I believe that zSql, and hence zTail also, are pointers to a UTF-8 code sequence. [a] The reason that I did not advise the pointer arithmetic you suggest is because it does not yield the number of characters consumed unless they happened to be restricted to the ASCII subset of UTF-8 code points. [a. Per [the sqlite3_prepare doc](https://sqlite.org/c3ref/prepare.html), zSql is "/* SQL statement, UTF-8 encoded */". ]