The world seems to be headed to UTF-8 for everything.  That&#x27;s why having Python3 force us away from it doesn&#x27;t make sense to me.<p>As for regular expressions, they work perfectly if your delimiters are in the ASCII range.  If you&#x27;re trying to match a single character then they don&#x27;t work for Unicode even when using Python3&#x27;s unicode type.  The reason is that code points are not characters.