Comment by alberth

Read that a few times back then as well, but that and other pieces of the day never told you how to actually write a program that supported Unicode. Just facts about it.

So I went around fixing UnicodeErrors in Python at random, for years, despite knowing all that stuff. It wasn't until I read Batchelder's piece on the "Unicode Sandwich," about a decade later that I finally learned how to write a program to support it properly, rather than playing whack-a-mole.