note JavaFan You seem to be confusing "1-to-1" mapping, and "identity function". While the identity function is a trivial "1-to-1" mapping, it's not true every "1-to-1" mapping is the identity function. <p> However, even side-stepping that, Juerd doesn't mean byte values map 1-to-1. The mapping is <em>after decoding</em>. For instance, the UTF-8 byte sequence 0x82 0xC3 decodes to C2. Which indeed does map to the C2 Unicode code point. 661510 881386