One of the reasons I have for trying to understand Unicode is my collection of music and books. Many artists and authors have non-ASCII characters in their names or titles of their work. The reason Unicode exists is because we no longer live in a mono-language / mono-character set world. As a Perl programmer, I have torn more hair out than I've lost naturally. There are several layers at work in a digital environment and they all have to talk to each other correctly if Unicode is going to work. <ol> <li>the OS</li> <li>the programming language</li> <li>the editor / authoring tool used to write the code</li> <li>the database engine</li> <li>the browser or agent used to view a page</li> </ol> There may be more but it's almost like quantum physics - if you think you understand it you're wrong. In my work I've given up trying to get all the parts working together and gone straight back to ASCII. A search form on my sites contains a drop-down list of authors, artists and titles because a user-supplied search for any non-ASCII characters would not work. But at some point I will figure it all out. When that happens I'll tackle quantum physics.