I built a smart contract that took user text input, validated it, and trigger an action. While building it, I was frustrated by the lack of string utilities and introspection tools available to Solidity, so I built some of my own. I open sourced the libraries and started the Unicode Ethereum Project to port the Unicode Character Database (UCD) to Ethereum:https://github.com/devstein/unicode-eth
Check it out and let me know what you think!