Attempt at Unicode.

I've been using Blitzmax for a short while now and I'm quite disappointed to see that while it claims to support UTF-8 format, it cannot read or display text encoded in this way. I understand that for the majority this is not a problem, but I (like others I've seen on this board) need to display non-roman characters such as Japanese.

I know nothing of how UTF actually works, but so far I have managed to display Japanese text using an array of individual character codes (sourced using charmap) and reading them into a string.
Is there anyway of reading these codes into the array from a text file? I know readbyte() can be used for ASCII files but it doesn't work for UTF as its values exceed 255. Any suggestions?

I read a post from a year ago where Mark said that he was going to implement this function in the next version of BMax but unfortunately I don't think it happened :(
It’s a shame because living in Japan as I do, it would be a rather useful feature.

Here is my code for anyone who wants to see...

Strict
Graphics 800,600,0

Global font:Timagefont=LoadImageFont("c:\windows\fonts\msgothic.ttc",150,SMOOTHFONT)
SetImageFont font

Global kana[]=[12371,12435,12395,12385,12399]
Global s$


For Local i=0 To kana.length-1
	s$=s$+Chr(kana[i])
Next

While Not KeyHit(KEY_ESCAPE)
	Cls
	
	SetBlend alphablend
	SetScale 1,1
	DrawText s$,20,200
	SetScale 0.15,0.15
	DrawText "[konnichiwa]",350,350

	Flip
Wend

GCCollect