Unicode is more complicated than that. First of all, there is not a single definition of what the idea of a &quot;single character&quot; even is. It could be code points, composed characters, grapheme clusters, or something else.<p>However, in practice there are very few situations where a programmer would ever need to make this distinction for arbitrary text. If you give me an example of where you feel that you need to split an arbitrary string by &quot;character&quot;, I&#x27;m pretty sure I&#x27;ll be able to counter that with an explanation as to why that is not the right thing to do.