> Using utf-8 as the internal unicode representation is flawed too - index and length operations are slow. And this perfectly illustrates what I posted in anot

> Using utf-8 as the internal unicode representation is flawed too - index and length operations are slow. And this perfectly illustrates what I posted in another comment elsewhere. Thinking that doing operations on code points (indexing and length) is the proper thing to do. You need to use a unicode library to work on graphemes and take into account grapheme clusters. > For regexes, \w matches any unicode word character From what I've read, \w just matches code points. I did find that the https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex module supports \X which matches graphemes as per the unicode spec http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/.