diff --git a/scripts/geodata/string_utils.py b/scripts/geodata/string_utils.py
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..3812f112
--- /dev/null
+++ b/scripts/geodata/string_utils.py
@@ -0,0 +1,36 @@
+import sys
+from encoding import safe_decode
+
+NUM_CODEPOINTS = 0x10FFFF + 1
+
+
+def wide_unichr(i):
+    if i <= sys.maxunicode:
+        return unichr(i)
+    else:
+        return '\U{0:08x}'.format(i).decode('unicode-escape')
+
+
+def wide_ord(c):
+    if len(c) == 1:
+        return ord(c)
+    elif len(c) == 2:
+        h, l = c
+        return ((ord(h) - 0xD800) * 0x400) + (ord(l) - 0xDC00) + 0x10000
+
+    return None
+
+
+def wide_iter(s):
+    skip = False
+    s = safe_decode(s)
+    for i, c in enumerate(s):
+        if skip:
+            skip = False
+            continue
+
+        if 0xD800 <= ord(c) <= 0xDBFF:
+            yield s[i:i+2]
+            skip = True
+            continue
+        yield c