I just saw this in the jabber logs
(01:20:33) *bryce:* to delete the first N chars off the start of a string s, is it ok to do s += N?
The answer, for most of our stuff, is a big resounding "NO!"
Remember, when multibyte encodings come into play, doing something like that is liable to break things mid-sequence and corrupt data. Or to get the wrong count and trim fewer characters that you'd expect.
In most places our code is using the 'standard' GTK+ encoding of UTF-8. That's multibyte, with from 1 to 6 bytes per character. Of course, if you're at the point where raw data is entering the app via some means other than UI widgets, the bytes will be in whatever the local encoding is.
So just remember, characters no longer match bytes one-for-one. Sometimes they'll happen to align, but other times not.