The sad thing is returning unicode code points is probably not going properly do what you wanted to do either... sliding down the slippery slope, you'd end up n

The sad thing is returning unicode code points is probably not going properly do what you wanted to do either... sliding down the slippery slope, you'd end up needing a text layout renderer and a language model to do what you thought you wanted to do. (and then there'll be a thousand bugs and edge cases that your libraries didn't handle properly)