These functions are somewhat misnamed anyway (they convert to UTF-16
byte streams), and you can always explicitly manipulate UTF-16 using
the Charset.encoder/decoder functions. UTF-8 is far more common, and
the corresponding string_to_utf8/utf8_to_string functions are more
usefully named too.
Is Pike 8.0 a good time to drop string_to_unicode() and unicode_to_string()?
ChrisA