Java strings are UTF-16

The way strings are stored internally doesn't really matter.

While Perl stores unicode strings internally as UTF-8 (or something very close to it), it can encode those strings to many other encodings for output.  The same holds for Java: while it stores strings internally as UTF-16, there's no problem creating UTF-8 output, for example.

Writer utf8out = new BufferedWriter(
                     new OutputStreamWriter(
                         new FileOutputStream("outfile"), "UTF-8"
                     )
                 ); 
utf8out.write("some unicode data");
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