[buildUCD] make MetaTools script not depend on fontTools

Removed fontTools imports to prevent bootstrapping issues for
downstream package maintainers that wish to run buildUCD.py at
build time (i.e. when fontTools is not installed yet).

MetaTools/buildUCD.py

@@ -5,7 +5,6 @@ Tools to parse data files from the Unicode Character Database.
 
 from __future__ import print_function, absolute_import, division
 from __future__ import unicode_literals
-from fontTools.misc.py23 import *
 
 try:
     from urllib.request import urlopen
@@ -16,9 +15,16 @@ import re
 from codecs import iterdecode
 import logging
 import os
+from io import open
 from os.path import abspath, dirname, join as pjoin, pardir, sep
 
 
+try:  # pragma: no cover
+    unicode
+except NameError:
+    unicode = str
+
+
 UNIDATA_URL = "https://unicode.org/Public/UNIDATA/"
 UNIDATA_LICENSE_URL = "http://unicode.org/copyright.html#License"
 
@@ -83,14 +89,14 @@ def parse_range_properties(infile, default=None, is_set=False):
 
         first = int(first, 16)
         last = int(last, 16)
-        data = tostr(data.rstrip(), encoding="ascii")
+        data = str(data.rstrip())
 
         ranges.append((first, last, data))
 
     ranges.sort()
 
     if isinstance(default, unicode):
-        default = tostr(default, encoding="ascii")
+        default = str(default)
 
     # fill the gaps between explicitly defined ranges
     last_start, last_end = -1, -1