I'm still unclear on why ChatColor.stripColor is insufficient for your purposes here?  A § symbol in Minecraft code refers to a chat formatting character, be it color or style.  Under this context, treating that character similarly, but with different filtering characteristics diverges it's meaning from the centralized ChatColor implementation.  What is the justification for that?  Is there some use case in the Map API that needs to treat §A as two individual characters and not a formatting code? 

After my quick review of the Map API it doesn't even seem like chat formatting codes are properly treated anywhere in it.  Perhaps I'm overlooking something?  But even if it is, it should be treated like a chat formatting code is elsewhere and not separately unless a use case exists I'm not clear on.

Does the Map API even color text according to chat formatting codes anywhere?  If not, the § character should actually generate an exception itself as not a valid character and the ```isValid``` method should be updated accordingly.