I know how that feels. I wrote a little c++ program to fetch data in Unicode from a dB and then normalize it to ascii to be used for analytic purposes. A lot faster to do it on ascii than trying to handle all the fun cases of how many ways can an e etc... be input. ICU to the rescue! Took a couple weeks of getting up to speed as ICU itself wasn't too bad to figure out. But, you find out very quickly that to use it, you need to have a good understanding of a number of the Unicode technical reports to actually understand how to make use of it. Fun times indeed.