To be fair, there is basically no way to manipulate arbitrary text at all without mangling it, UTF-8-aware or not. What does it mean to take the first 7 characters of a UTF-8 string which might contain combinator characters and left-to-right special chars? What if the text uses special shaping chars, such as arranging hieroglyphs in cartouches? You basically need a text-rendering aware library to manipulate arbitrary strings.