&gt;There are plenty of uses for getting the length of a string where you will not be running into combining characters, clusters or any other things which would require special handling.<p>How do you know that? Any user supplied text may contain those things.<p>&gt;remember that on the internet, all the data you receive is initially in string form<p>It&#x27;s not. It&#x27;s bytes.<p>&gt;very often we want to receive data representing fixed-length values such as phone numbers or credit card numbers<p>This is a good example of why strings shouldn&#x27;t have a length property - people don&#x27;t understand what length actually does in most languages. If you think that a len() function can verify that the contents of a text field is in the format of a CC number then you don&#x27;t understand the len function. It can&#x27;t do what you are asking. See the examples given in the GP (len(&quot;\u0301&quot;) for example).<p>The fact that the people who advocate for length functions want to use them for things that they are broken for is exactly why length functions shouldn&#x27;t exist.