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As long as you handle usual letters it is no problem to miss Unicode.

How nice Unicode is I always realize when I copy and paste some foreign text from somewhere into Emacs or Racket Scheme and everything works just fine.

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What he's trying to say is that Lua's strings are capable of storing Unicode characters (they're "8-bit clean"), but that Lua's string manipulation functions aren't Unicode-aware. If you want to paste Unicode characters into a string and print it later, Lua can handle it. If you want to do a pattern match on a Unicode string, you need to bring your own pattern matcher.

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