That ship sailed long before Unicode. ISO/IEC 8859-1 Included several accents which combine with a preceding character, and that was standardised in 1987. If yo

That ship sailed long before Unicode. ISO/IEC 8859-1 Included several accents which combine with a preceding character, and that was standardised in 1987. If you only deal in English then remove all accents and map everything down to 7 bit ASCII, if you don’t just deal with English then accept that and deal with it. :-) Having had to do some internationalisation of code written by Americans that couldn’t even handle 8 bit characters I am fine with spreading this bit of pain a little more evenly round the world.