Well, of course, the surrogates probably shouldn't be handled separately in one module independently of the rest of the standard library. (I actually don't know such narrow implementation (although it is mentioned in those unicode quidelines 
http://unicode.org/reports/tr18/#Supplementary_Characters )

The main surprise on my part was due to the compile error rather than empty match as was the case with re; 
but now I see, that it is a consequence of the newly introduced wide unicode notation, the matching behaviour changed consistently.

(for my part, the workarounds I found, seem to be sufficient in the cases I work with wide unicode; most likely I am not going to compile wide unicode build on windows myself in the near future :-)
 vbr