"C. Benson Manica" <cbmanica at gmail.com> wrote in message news:98375575-1071-46af-8ebc-f3c817b47e1d at q23g2000yqd.googlegroups.com... >The strings come from the same place, i.e. they're exclusively > normal ASCII characters. In this case then converting them to/from UTF-8 is a no-op, so it makes no difference at all.