The error messages may have gone away, but the underlying unicode limitations I mentioned remain:

Suppose you wanted to use shlex to build a parser for Chinese text.  Would you have to set "wordchars" to a string containing every possible Chinese character?

I myself wrote a parser for a crude language where words can contain any character except for whitespace and parenthesis.  I needed a way to specify the characters which cannot belong to a word.  (That's how I solved the problem.  I modified shlex.py and added a "wordterminators" member.  If "wordterminators" was left blank, then "wordchars" were used instead.  This was a trivial change to "shlex.py" and it added a lot of functionality.)

I would like to suggest making this change (or something similar) to the official version of "shlex.py".  Would sending an email to "python-ideas@python.org" be a good place to make this proposal?