And I wrote this, and then decided to poke at it again, and discovered: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex Which implements

And I wrote this, and then decided to poke at it again, and discovered: https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex Which implements the '\X' grapheme-matching operator, and does in fact allow Python to identify palindromes in Unicode (first normalize and strip out any categories of characters to ignore, then findall(r'\X') returns a list of graphemes in the input, which can be compared to itself in reverse to determine palindromicity).