One thing to consider here is the performance cost of the encodings. I haven't looked this in ages - it came up as a serious issue for the Scratch improvement stuff I did for Pi, so maybe 5 years? - but it was the case that reading a file with a multi-byte stream was at least 30X slower than a plain byte stream.

tim
--
tim Rowledge; tim at rowledge.org; http://www.rowledge.org/tim
Useful random insult:- If brains were taxed, he'd get a rebate.