"I feel your pain".

The mess that is character encoding pisses me off no end. I solve the problem by trying to ignore it. Until the rest of the world is willing to Do The Right Thing and just use simple 32-bit (or 64-bit) fixed width characters, I'm not going to go out of my way to accomodate other peoples' stupidity. If this causes me to fail to read your text, or causes me to emit text that someone else can't read, I DON'T CARE.

Perhaps I'd be a little more accepting of odd character encodings if the crack-smoking loonies who'd invented them had simultaneously produced working libraries for dealing with them. But, for values of "working" that I care about (ie it Just Works), they didn't. I have no interest in setting the splindlebibbit bit in the garbleflux configuration file, I just want to type emails properly in Anglo-Saxon.

My hatred for XML is a whole other rant :-)

Incidentally, the fact that some very clever people can't get it to Just Work (hi perl5 developers!) indicates to me that the design is wrong.