… does it work at a level higher than code units? From what I recall, leftpad's implementation worked at the level of code units, i.e., it padded to a particula

… does it work at a level higher than code units? From what I recall, leftpad's implementation worked at the level of code units, i.e., it padded to a particular number of code units, which is bugged for just about any use case one might apply it to. That is, if you had the strings "a" and "é" (where the latter is "e\u0301") padded "equally" to length 3, leftpad would pad them approximately thusly: __a _é > leftpad('e\u0301', 3, '_'); <- "_é"