this is normalization issue, not version issue

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).

Python 3.9.9 (main, Nov 20 2021, 21:30:06) [GCC 11.1.0] on linux

EDIT: I can't seem to replicate this on my Ubuntu system. Strange.

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.

Actually browser normalized string and it works for me also. Here is original byte sequence:

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

But I agree, it's rare case when you need to deal with non-normalized data.