A Unicode string is turned into a string of bytes containing no embedded zero bytes. This avoids byte-ordering issues, and means UTF-8 strings can be processed by C functions such as strcpy () and ...

encode ()/decode () A Unicode string is a sequence of code points, which are numbers from 0 to 0x10ffff. This sequence needs to be represented as a set of bytes (meaning, values from 0–255) in memory.