There is not such thing as "Russian string". More than that, there is not such thing as "Russian script" or Unicode range or subset — there is "Cyrillic", used by Russian, Ukranian, Belorussian, Bulgarian and some other Slavic and many Asian languages. There is not even the "Cyrillic string" — all strings are Unicode in .NET (and practically all modern platforms). In the same way, there is no "Hindi string" or even "Hindi script", there is Devanagari. There is no "Russian code", "Cyrillic code", "Hindi code" or even "Devanagari" — this is Unicode in the form of different UTFs; there are also obsoleted encodings, but not one per language — many of them, unfortunately.
OK, this is a big confusion. Everyone needs to understand Unicode a bit, see
http://unicode.org/[
^].
See also UTF FAQ:
http://unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html[
^].
Maybe somebody still thinks Unicode is a 16-bit code. Wrong! Read a bit about it, good to know…
—SA