Yes, the danger is when people think 'Encodings are too complicated! Surely my framework/platform/library should be abstracting all this stuff for me?' and then proceed to assume that because it should be dealt with at a lower level, that is is dealt with at a lower level. All I/O encoding abstractions leak sooner or later. For which reason, all programmers need to stop pretending encodings don't affect them and read this: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html