[ 2005-October-01 20:15 ] Tim Bray describes why Unicode and UTF-8 are wonderful much better than I could, so go read that for an overview of what Unicode is, and why all your programs should support it. What I'm going to tell you is how to use Unicode, and specifically UTF-8, with one of the coolest programming languages, Python, but I have also written an introduction to Using Unicode in C/C++.