Need to enable working with UTF-8 in Lua itself: using gsub, string.len(), comparing text, and so on. LuaUnicode describes the usecases well. This is just to a reasonable degree that would be useful in scripting - we can't provide every single function that could be used on utf8 text such as character classification.

There are quite a few different solutions to this. There are many Lua libraries (some even pure Lua) that implement this functionality and everyone seems to be their own solution, so need to research on the best way to go about it.