I am responding to your earlier post which announced that UCS2 is better than UTF8 internally because it counts unicode characters faster than UTF8. Hopefully now you understand that just taking the number of UCS2 bytes and dividing by 2 does not give you the number of letters.

Just in case you don't, let's walk through it again.

UCS-16 big-endian represenation of Ä:

0x00 0x41 0x03 0x08

Another UCS-16 big-endian representation of Ä:

0x00 0xc4

If you look at the number of bytes, the first example has 4. It represents one letter. The second example has 2. It also represents one letter. Conclusion: UCS2 does not "count unicode characters faster than UTF8." You still have to look at every byte to see how many letters you have, same as in UTF-8.

Do you grasp this? If not, maybe you are one of those "ascii-centric ignorant morons" I keep hearing so much about.