>>> "ñ"[0]
    'n'
    >>> "ñ"[1]
    '̃'

  >>> "ñ"[0]
  'ñ'
  >>> "ñ"[1]
  IndexError: string index out of range

import unicodedata list(unicodedata.normalize('NFD', "ñ")) >> ['n', '̃']

list(unicodedata.normalize('NFC', "ñ")) >> ['ñ']

both are correct, the issue is that unicode allows accented letters to be written as _accented_letter_ or _letter_, _accent_. The idea of "character" in uncicode is not very useful, most of the time you will want graphemes, not codepoints. User-friendliness wise, this is what Python should use (another rant - strings should not have length method, they should have byte_length, codepoint_length and grapheme_length).

Ah, interesting, I suppose then there is a difference in the way Linux handles strings? Didn't realize that, very unfortunate if true. I am running MacOS.

    >>> b'n\xcc\x83'.decode()
    'ñ'
    >>> b'n\xcc\x83'.decode()[0]
    'n'
    >>> b'n\xcc\x83'.decode()[1]
    '̃'