How to deal with unicode in strings?

[MBaas]

I'm trying to wrtite macros that deal with unicode characters - and noticed that very soon unicode is lost:

Code:

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str s.getclip;
paste s; 
str b=s;b=b.left(b 1);
paste b;

the first paste is fine, b hasn't survived. Do I need a different declaration to enable unicode for b or what's the problem?