Hi,
I just read the quiz and the solutions an as I had to parse some unicode text I had an idea: why not using "unpack" on the string and getting the number of the character in the code. Then you could also (with some manual code replace a "o" by an ö or other similar looking characters.
str1="und seine Höhlen"
string = str1.unpack('U*')
Cheers
Wolfgang