Why ElementType!(char[3]) == dchar instead of char?

[Justin Whear via Digitalmars-d-learn]

On Tue, 01 Sep 2015 19:40:24 +0300, drug wrote:

> I'm just trying to automatically convert D types to hdf5 types so I
> guess char[..] isn't obligatory some form of UTF-8 encoded text. Or I
> should treat it so?

Because of D's autodecoding it can be problematic to assume UTF-8 if 
other encodings are actually in use.  If, for instance, you try printing 
a string stored as char[] that is actually Latin-1 encoded and contains 
characters from the high range, you'll get a runtime UTF-8 decoding 
exception.  If you don't know ahead of time what the encoding will be, 
using ubyte[] will be safer.  The other option is to dynamically reencode 
strings to UTF-8 as you read them.