unicode string alteration

[BAvant Garde]

HELP!!!
I need help with a unicode issue that has me stumped. I must be doing something  wrong because I don't believe this condition would have slipped thru testing.

Wherever the string u'\udbff\udc00' occurs u'\U0010fc00' or unichr(1113088) is substituted and the file loses 1 character resulting in all trailing characters being shifted out of position. No other corrupt strings have been detected.
    
The condition was noticed while testing in Python 2.6.5 on Ubuntu 10.04 where the maximum ord # is 1114111 (wide Python build).
    
Using Python 2.5.4 on Windows-ME where the maximum ord # is 65535 (narrow Python build) the string u'\U0010fc00' also occurs and it "seems" that the substitution takes place but no characters are lost and file sizes are ok. Note that ord(u'\U0010fc00')
 causes the following error: 
             "TypeError: ord() expected a character, but string of length 2 found"
The condition is otherwise invisible in 2.5.4 and is handled internally without any apparent effect on processing with characters u'\udbff' and u'\udc00' each being separately accessible. 

The first part of the attachment repeats this email but also has examples and illustrates other related oddities.
    
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Bruce


      
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/attachments/20100812/87b570f6/attachment.html>
-------------- next part --------------
An embedded and charset-unspecified text was scrubbed...
Name: unicode_internals_question_linux2.txt
URL: <http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/attachments/20100812/87b570f6/attachment.txt>