This article is about the ugliest, but potentially most useful piece of open-source software I’ve written this year. It’s messy, because UTF-8 is messy. The world’s most widely used text encoding standard was introduced in 1989. It now covers more than 1 million characters across the majority of used writing systems, so it’s not exactly trivial to work with.The example above contains multiple confusable characters: German Eszett variants 'ß'U+00DF0x C3 9F and 'ẞ'U+1E9E0x E1 BA 9E , the Kelvin si...