That's not enough for all languages and hence "wide characters", or 16 bit ones.

Perl's wide chars are 32-bit or 64-bit depending on the build, not 16. 

fmdev10$ perl -le'print ord "\x{FFFFFFFF}"'
4294967295

[download]
persephone$ perl -le'print ord "\x{FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF}"'
18446744073709551615

[download]

Unicode currently requires 17 bits.

is each byte a character or is two bytes a character?

Or something else entirely, as in the following popular encodings: UTF-8 (1-4 bytes per char currently, 1-6 possible), UTF-16le/UTF-16be (2 or 4 bytes per char).

In reply to Re^2: Perl Modules for handling Non English text by ikegami
in thread Perl Modules for handling Non English text by paragkalra

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