quarantine 'em

(a word being the term for 2 or more bytes, not a word like we use)

OK, so my statement is mainly about Unicode strings, not reversing encoded bytes in any particular encoding.

so what did you mean by 'no concept of string reversal' ?

I mean there's nothing in any version of the Unicode standard which explains how to reverse a string.

I wouldt expect to find such a thing in the unicode standard anymore than I woulnt expect to find it in the ASCII or ANSI standards...

If you want to reverse a string you run a bit of code that loops from the last character to the first - nomatter how its encoded

There's a lot of reasons why this general approach can result in gibberish Unicode. Combining diacritics, ligatures, RTL scripts

thats usually because of the variable word length - take UTF16 for example where each character is either 2 or 4 bytes