yeah i confused that with ISO 10646 (has the 3 levels which specify unicode, not all levels support the same characters) and UCS2, which UCS2 is essentially UTF-16, so i meant if he used any characters bytecoded in UTF-16 essentially he'd have a problem, although utf-8 doesnt support certain octets. UTF-8/16 were not yet part of the standard before UCS version 2.0. Been a while I guess since i got updated