Reading UTF-8 text files with ReadList

Question

Is it possible to use ReadList to read UTF-8 (or any other) encoded text files using ReadList[..., Word], or is it ASCII-only? If it\'s ASCII-only

Answer 1

If I leave out Word, this works:

$CharacterEncoding = "UTF-8";

ReadList["UTF8.txt"]

This however is a failure, because the data is not read as strings.

Please try this on a larger file and report its performance:

FromCharacterCode[BinaryReadList["UTF8.txt"], "UTF-8"]