Regarding Unicode, it is important to distinguish between the character number and the encoding. See especially http://www.unicode.org/standard/principles.html#Encoding_Forms and http://unicode.org/standard/WhatIsUnicode.html and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unicode and http://www.unicode.org/standard/where/ "To keep character coding simple and efficient, the Unicode Standard assigns each character a unique numeric value and name." The way that number is encoded can differ. Three of the most common ways to encode it are UTF-8, UTF-16, and UTF-32. UTF-8 and UTF-16 are both variable-width encodings. UTF-32 is fixed width. "UTF-8 is popular for HTML and similar protocols. ... It has the advantages that the Unicode characters corresponding to the familiar ASCII set have the same byte values as ASCII, and that Unicode characters transformed into UTF-8 can be used with much existing software without extensive software rewrites." "[In UTF-16] all the heavily used characters fit into a single 16-bit code unit, while all other characters are accessible via pairs of 16-bit code units." "UTF-32 is useful where memory space is no concern, but fixed width, single code unit access to characters is desired. Each Unicode character is encoded in a single 32-bit code unit when using UTF-32." "All three encoding forms need at most 4 bytes (or 32-bits) of data for each character." Chris Glur said: "<single quote> which is *3 bytes*" That would be the case in a UTF-8 encoding of a single-quote character. UTF-8 could result in a 3-byte encoding, UTF-16 and UTF-32 could not. According to http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U2000.pdf the character number could be 2018, 2019, 201A, or 201B. Or 0027 or 02BC or 275C. According to http://www.unicode.org/charts/PDF/U0000.pdf an ASCII apostrophe is 0027. That also says that 2019 is preferred for apostrophe. So PART of what we're dealing with may be that the apostrophe/single-quote is being encoded as one of the "single-quote" characters, probably the preferred 2019 character, rather than as an 0027 "apostrophe". I have never had to write code to deal with Unicode, but co-workers have. A brute-force technique they used when memory and time allowed was to detect and convert whatever input encoding was provided to UTF-32, then deal with the text as fixed-width 32-bit "characters", then convert back to whatever encoding was desired. That approach could work reasonably well when implementing a character-by-character parser.