Michael Snoyman
As far as space usage, you are correct that CJK data will take up more memory in UTF-8 than UTF-16.
With the danger of sounding ... alphabetist? as well as belaboring a point I agree is irrelevant (the storage format): I'd point out that it seems at least as unfair to optimize for CJK at the cost of Western languages. UTF-16 uses two bytes for (most) CJK ideograms, and (all, I think) characters in Western and other phonetic scripts. UTF-8 uses one to two bytes for a lot of Western alphabets, but three for CJK ideograms. Now, CJK has about 20K ideograms, which is almost 15 bits per ideogram, while an ASCII letter is about six bits. Thus, the information density of CJK and ASCII is about equal for UTF-8, 5/8 vs 6/8 - compared to 15/16 vs 6/16 for UTF-16. In other words a given document translated between Chinese and English should occupy roughly the same space in UTF-8, but be 2.5 times longer in English for UTF-16. -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants