Vim (vimscript) get exact character under the cursor

Question

I am getting the character under the cursor in vimscript the following way:

getline(\'.\')[col(\'.\')-1] 

It works exactly like it should,

Answer 1

Though I cannot reproduce the problem you're describing, there's another problem with your code: Because of the string indexing (and this is one of the uglier sides of Vimscript), it only works with single-byte characters, but will fail to capture chars like Ä or