Adventures in Unicode the str less travelled: Alistair Lynn

Python 3's str was a leap forward but not a panacea. Join me to dive into the strange world of unicode, how it can bite you, and what to do about it.
In Python 3 we finally got a Unicode-native str type throughout, and there was much rejoicing. But Unicode is a tricky beast, difficult to tame, and there are still plenty of ways it can bite you if you are not careful.
We will look at some of these ways, the eldritch abominations looming in shadowy corners of Python's text; we will discover how the siren-song of seemingly innocuous strings can dash you upon the rocks, the deep peculiarity of the humble flag, and finally come to inner peace and harmony as we understand true grapheme-nature.
We will then touch on the deeper mysteries of bidirectional text, and our hearts will turn to despair. It will be a fun time.
Alistair is a software engineer who lives between Southampton and Amsterdam. Formerly of Thread, and of years of freelancing, he now works at Tiqets. His interests are software architecture, jazz fusion, linguistics, obscure transport policy, and writing in the third person.