Maple strings contain extended ASCII characters (codes 1..255). 
The international characters such as  î, ș, Å, Ø ,Ă, Æ, Ç are multi-byte encoded. They are ignored by the Maple engine but are known to the user interface which uses the UTF-8 encoding.
The package StringTools does not support this encoding. However it is not difficult to manage these characters using Python commands (included in the Maple distribution now).
Here are the UTF-8 versions of the Maple procedures length and substring.
You may want to improve these procedures, or to add new ones (my knowledge of Python is very limited).

LEN:=proc(s::string) Python:-EvalFunction("len",s) end proc:

SS:=proc(s::string, mn::{integer, range(({integer,identical()}))})
  local m,n;
  if type(mn,integer) then m,n := mn$2 else m:=lhs(mn); n:=rhs(mn) fi; 
  if m=NULL then m:=1 fi; if n=NULL then n:=-1 fi;
  if n=-1 then n:=LEN(s) elif n<0 then n:=n+1 fi;
  if m=-1 then m:=LEN(s) elif m<0 then m:=m+1 fi;
  Python:-EvalString(cat("\"",  s, "\"", "[", m-1, ":", n, "]"  ));
end proc:

LEN("Canada"), length("Canada");
                              6, 6

s:="România":
LEN(s), length(s);
                              7, 8

SS(s, 1..), SS(s, 1..-3), SS(s, 1..1), SS(s, -7..2), SS(s,1), SS(s,-1); 
            "România", "Român", "R", "Ro", "R", "a"