In article <[🔎] 20090811183800.GE5487@const.famille.thibault.fr> you wrote: > Not necessarily. Any sane implementation should just use wchar_t Which could be UTF16 and therefore still has complicatd length semantics. And even with UTF32 there are combining characters. Sadly. But the length could be defined in code units - its just a question how usefull it is. Gruss Bernd