Whilst attempting to implement DBCS encoding, I have discovered that skip_backward cannot be implemented for this encoding style, due to the mixture of 1-byte and 2-byte characters.
Some of the available options: 1) Throw an exception if somebody tries to skip_backward in a DBCS string 2) Standardise on a single Unicode format for all internal string processing 3) Convert all strings in DBCS encoding to another format, either always or only when skip_backward is invoked 4) Pass additional context information to skip_backward, so it can fall back to counting forward when required 5) Remove skip_backward completely 6) Do not support DBCS encoding 7) Create an index for DBCS strings (i.e. a map of character offset versus byte offset) - this would also require that skip_backward receive additional data More options, preferences, comments, etc all welcome. Regards Peter Gibbs EmKel Systems