You got me curious about grapheme matching in Python with regex. It looks like it is not in the stdlib yet with 3.3. However, it you install https://pypi.python

You got me curious about grapheme matching in Python with regex. It looks like it is not in the stdlib yet with 3.3. However, it you install https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex https://pypi.python.org/pypi/regex and then replace: import re with import regex as re Then if you want to get into using graphemes slicing, you could use something like: import regex as re decomposed_str = 'o\u0308o\u0327' graphemes = re.findall('(\\X)', decomposed_str) sub_graphemes = grapheme[1:] decomposed_substr = ''.join(sub_graphemes)