How best to handle Unicode where only 8-bit chars are now?

[Skip Montanaro]

    >> Option 3 seems the cleanest, but would slow everything down
    >> significantly because character extraction and comparison would
    >> require a function call instead of an array index operation or a
    >> simple comparison.

    Fredrik> what makes you think 8-bit == fast and unicode == slow?

Nothing, just unfamiliarity.  That's why I was asking.

    Fredrik> have you looked at SRE?  it compiles portions of itself twice,
    Fredrik> to get 8-bit and unicode versions of the core engine.  on
    Fredrik> modern machines, the unicode version often runs *faster* than
    Fredrik> the corresponding 8-bit code.

I'll refer the csv authors to this.

Thx,

Skip