Something to make life easier in the world of UTF-16 would be great. We use a commercial software package that started out pure ASCII for its control files but has, with subsequent releases/upgrades, begun to use UTF-16 for their files. We have put off upgrading to later versions of thier software because we have quite a number of perl scripts that add functionality (allow bulk changes instead of item-by-item) for us, but we haven't had the time to try to convert our scripts to adapt to UTF-16. Something seamless to allow for either input with a minimum of fuss/translation would be a godsend.