and still advertise that the underlying encoding is UTF-8 You can, but I'd avoid it. If you want to offer multiple levels of abstraction, you'll want to offer

and still advertise that the underlying encoding is UTF-8 You can, but I'd avoid it. If you want to offer multiple levels of abstraction, you'll want to offer a code point abstraction in between graphemes and bytes. And for several reasons you'll probably want to either have, or have the ability to emit, fixed-width units. Python does this internally (3.3 and newer): the internal storage of a string is chosen at runtime, based on the widest code point in the string, and uses whichever fixed-width encoding (latin-1, UCS-2 or UCS-4) will accommodate that. This dodges problems like accidental leakage of the low-level storage into the high-level abstraction (prior to 3.3 Python, like a number of languages, would "leak" the internal implementation detail of surrogate pairs into the high-level string abstraction).