> The inefficiency would be if prefix were re-converted from UTF-8 > for each term, e.g., in order to compare it to the target.
Ahhh, gotcha. A related problem exists even if the prefix length vInt is changed to represent the number of unicode chars (as opposed to number of java chars), right? The prefix length is no longer the offset into the char[] to put the suffix. Another approach might be to convert the target to a UTF-8 byte[] and do all comparisons on byte[]. UTF-8 has some very nice properties, including that the byte[] representation of UTF-8 strings compare the same as UCS-4 would. As you say, the variations need to be tested. -Yonik Now hiring -- http://tinyurl.com/7m67g
