A requirement for merging this should be identifying exactly what it's fixing. I had thought it might be fixing issues like#670 but that has to do with terminal escapes - this is really only a unicode fix.

Another issue:print('a\tsdf'*100) crashes with this patch applied (previously how did this work?)

Not entirely sure but could you, while you're in this part of the code, see if this also gets resolved:#724 with the patches?

@rybarczykj knows where this is if we work on this more, I'm closing because even if we do this it won't be with this PR.