so \x{2018} is a two-byte encoding of chr(32) and chr(30)

Sorry, but no, this is incorrect. \x{2018} is not valid JavaScript, so I'm assuming it's Perl. In Perl, \x{2018} is interpreted as the Unicode character U+2018, LEFT SINGLE QUOTATION MARK, decimal 8216. Although one normally shouldn't have to worry about the internal encoding Perl uses, here it is anyway:

$ perl -CSD -MDevel::Peek -le 'my $x="\x{2018}"; Dump($x); print "<$x>"'
SV = PV(0x2147e80) at 0x21675b0
  REFCNT = 1
  FLAGS = (POK,IsCOW,pPOK,UTF8)
  PV = 0x21694e0 "\342\200\230"\0 [UTF8 "\x{2018}"]
  CUR = 3
  LEN = 10
  COW_REFCNT = 1
<‘>

Minor fixes.

https://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/char/2018/index.htm, and so on–

moo@cow[258]~>perl -CSD -le 'print "\x{2018}film about film\x{2019}"'
‘film about film’
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