Some characters take more than one column in a terminal, especially CJK (chinese, japanese, korean) characters. If you use such character in a terminal without taking care of the width in columns of each character, the text alignment can be broken. Issue #2382 is an example of this problem.
#2382 and #6755 have patches implementing such function:
- unicode_width.patch of #2382 adds unicode.width() method
- ucs2w.c of #6755 creates a new ucs2w module with two functions: unichr2w() (width of a character) and ucs2w() (width of a string)
Use test_ucs2w.py of #6755 to test these new functions/methods.