Similar happens with special characters, such as the umlaut and diacritic in an ANSI or UTF-8 encoded text file, doesn't it? UTF-16 uses 2 bytes for all characters, and is undesirable on all accounts. I have found one article where it mentions that UTF-8 without BOM does use 2 bytes for some of the special characters, and if that is true, then it is also not acceptable. Are we therefore bound to eliminate all special characters? or am I missing something in this Hebe??

- Also, what is your JSGME replacement suggestion? OMM?? Thank you!