<i>How do you know that? Any user supplied text may contain those things.</i><p>Which is why, in addition to things like length checks, we use other checks. But length is a quick and easy check for many types of values, and should be supported.<p>I&#x27;ve been down in the depths of Unicode behavior a time or two. I know what lurks down there, and I know from experience that your &quot;strings should never allow these operations&quot; stance is just as dumb as the more-common &quot;I don&#x27;t know what Unicode really is&quot; stance. Can length checks and slicing and other operations run into trouble in some corners of Unicode? Sure. But if &quot;this might cause trouble&quot; were grounds for forbidding programmers ever to do something, we wouldn&#x27;t have computers, any useful software at all, the internet or most of the other things we like and take for granted despite the fact that we occasionally have to fix bugs in it.<p>Now, get down off your snobby horse and join the rest of the real world, where we know that something might not be guaranteed reliable in all logically-possible cases, but find ways to work with it anyway because in 99.99% (or more) of the cases our code deals with it&#x27;s good enough.