I used to think bytes were neat,
Just ASCII laid out nice and sweet.
Seven bits were all I'd need,
To store my text and make it read.
But then the world grew big and wide–
And all my code broke deep inside.
The Germans came with ü and ß,
The French with ç and très complex.
The Chinese brought a mighty horde,
More glyphs than memory could afford.
My parser choked, my regex cried,
The BOM showed up and sanity died.
UTF-8? It's quite a hack–
A self-synced stream, no looking back.
Just read a byte, inspect its face,
Then count how many bytes to trace.
But UTF-16's got tricks, beware–
Surrogates lurking everywhere.
And UTF-32? A heavy beast–
It works, but memory's deceased.
I learned to normalize with care,
Because é and é are not a pair.
Sorting fails, the search gets slow,
Why can't these glyphs just let it go?
Yet Unicode is still a feat,
To make all scripts and symbols meet.
From Mongol runes to emoji flair,
One standard rules the text out there.
So now I raise a brace and cheer–
To every stressed i18n engineer.
Because though it makes our systems groan,
No one wants plain text alone.