Many record formats are defined with fields of fixed numbers of characters, padded with ’ ’ or 0s.
Also, for certain types of text analysis, you want to look at the distance in characters between two words or concepts in a sentence (having one type of ‘i’ take 1 byte, and another 3 bytes, totally screws up those sorts of calculations, and it’s not worth the performance hit there to make a little more accurate by looking by first doing decomposition/composition and calculating using grapheme clusters (something I had to be convinced about myself by an expert on computational linguistics, I thought using graphemes would be necessary, but Unicode codepoints are fine).
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