Unfortunately unicode in Python 3 is not necessarily better. See http://lucumr.pocoo.org/2014/5/12/everything-about-unicode/.
Even in Perl's supposedly superior support has issues. See how deep the rabbit hole goes by reading the first response to the question here:
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/6162484/why-does-modern-...
There is really no way for a simple program to account for all of those possible edge cases. Something as simple as a print of a string can be a minefield depending on what is in those characters. And it's not like the old days where you could safely filter out all non-printable characters to avoid most problems. Have you considered how your formatting is going to look when people intersperse Right to Left words in your output for example?
The post to linked you contained a piece of boiler-plate code which accounts for said cases.
> Have you considered how your formatting is going to look when people intersperse Right to Left words in your output for example?
There are modules to handle this. It of course means that you have to stop using non-Unicode-aware functions like `sprintf`.
Consider something as simple as outputting zero padded numbers (so they form a nice column in the output), except that the numbers might not be Arabic, zero might not be 0, they might not be written in the direction you expect, and padding might not even make sense. This is how you go crazy.
This is a serious problem and will I suspect one day be understood to be the biggest long-term mistake made when designing Python 3.
I wrote a comment about this a few months back at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9791211 (see second half of the initial comment and then the followups).