Random string samples & unicode - Reprise

[Walter Bright]

Andrej Mitrovic wrote:
> The "".join idiom itself is widespread (amongst those who know about
> it, at least). It's mentioned in several books and Python tutorials.
> As for taking random string samples, I've never used it so I can't
> judge whether it's common or not.

Yes, taking random substring samples seems very obscure to me.

Sure, taking a random index into a string may wind up in the middle of a UTF8 
sequence. But, in practice, indices into strings are not random. They are the 
result of some other operation on a string, and so they point to the start of a 
UTF8 sequence.