Documentation clearly says it doesn't - I posted a quote before.
True. I got that message some time later.
Valid point, although it still would be nice to see the kind of overhead the extra overhead incur.
Why? Is mere fact that I (or anyone else) don't want _any_ (no matter how small) overhead not enough? :)
I've already elaborated on that. Also, I said it would be _nice_, not _necessary_.
How do you know that string you wrote to file is valid UTF-8 when read back? How do you know what kind of data is stored in file or any other external source if you didn write it?
I know from other data (e.g. a user provided file name) and/or conventions (e.g. standard file extensions) in those cases. In this case there would be neither that is able tell whether the string should be decoded or not.