I think your issue is that, in general, Unicode is Hard(tm). For example: * How do you compare strings in Ruby so that an "o with umlaut" as a single character

I think your issue is that, in general, Unicode is Hard(tm). For example: * How do you compare strings in Ruby so that an "o with umlaut" as a single character can be compared against a "o" + "umlaut" characters. Technically they are both equivalent, but if you're doing comparisons by single characters (or bytes!), then you'll run into issues. * How do you use a regular expression in Python to match against o and "o with umlaut" as equivalent?