The only way they can get at the internal UTF-16
representation is via unicode_encode($uni, 'UTF-16') which
will return a binary UTF-16 string. In that case, strlen()
will work just as well.
Hmm, I was thinking we might have some binary write function which would do
that automagically. I think it'd be worth it.
Wasn't this the discussion we had regarding {} versus [] for string offset access? (The former referring to characters, the later referring to U16 units. I also recall we dropped that as the wtf potential outweighed the potential performance gain.