I'm still trying to find one valid use for length of string in unicode characters. What one usually needs to know is length of string as it's rendered by some output device, which is not related to count of unicode characters in any useful way. Even for fixed point fonts you can have glyphs that are composed from multiple unicode characters or characters whose glyphs occupy two consecutive positions.
That's weird, I thought its limit was deliberately low enough to fit into an SMS message, which has a limit of 140 octets (160 characters in some 7-bit encoding GSM uses). Do they actually allow, say, 140 kanji?
