> you are oversimplifying to the point of inaccuracy
No, what I wrote is an accurate reflection of Unicode.
It does not matter what Jean Dupont and Hong Gildong think, but what we agreed on as a standard.
> They do not exist as standalone code points in the binary form of the encoded text
This terminology is confused/conceptually wrong.
The binary form of encoded text consists of bytes. Decoded text consists of characters/grapheme clusters. A code point is the number corresponding to a character in the repertoire tables. By definition a code point cannot exist in encoded text.
The correct way to determine whether sœur contains œ or o is to use a standard compliant implementation. Perl has always been nothing short of excellent, so:
$ perl -Mutf8 -E'say "sœur" =~ "œ" ? "yes" : "no"'
yes
$ perl -Mutf8 -E'say "sœur" =~ "o" ? "yes" : "no"'
no
I'm not angry. Projecting much?