I think this should almost work...
string split cannot find the newline for some reason...
keep trying ... why is the newline gone?
WOW! That actually worked!
OK, that didn't actually work. WTF.
OK, previous version worked, but not for unicode
try to figure out why unicode fails
try explicit utf-8 decode/encode
try again
python is totally weird with its unicode support.
OK, try this
OK this works for english and no crash for russian

However, the utf8 handling for russian is still broken.
But maybe its in the java side. Investigating.