@eschwartz: No, the motivation for me doing regex was this:
https://bitbucket.org/mrabarnett/mra...locale-failure
I have to say I love the maintainer of regex. Alongwith apsw they are the only two upstream dependencies of calibre that have actually competent/active maintainers.
I dont mind in principle stripping out chardet. I just need to find the time to do some testing to make sure APIs haven't changed.