4 ms·

Not all user-perceived characters can be represented as a single Unicode codepoint. Hence, Unicode text encodings (almost[1]) always have to be treated as varia

by cygx 5y ago

Not all user-perceived characters can be represented as a single Unicode codepoint. Hence, Unicode text encodings (almost[1]) always have to be treated as variable length, even UTF-32. [1] at runtime, you could dynamically assign 'virtual' codepoints to grapheme clusters and get a fixed-length encoding for strings that way

jart 5y ago
Even the individual unicode codepoints themselves are variable width if we consider that things like cjk and emoji take up >1 monospace cells.
- lanstin 5y ago
  Every time I see one of these threads, my gratitude to only do backend grows. Human behavior is too complex, let the webdevs handle UI, and human languages are too complex, not sure what speciality handles that. Give me out of order packets and parsing code that skips a character if the packet length lines up just so any day. I am thankful that almost all the Unicode text I see is rendered properly now, farewell the little boxes. Good job lots of people.
  - jart 5y ago
    I think we really have the iPhone jailbreakers to thank for that. U.S. developers were allergic almost offended by anything that wasn't ASCII and then someone released an app that unlocked the emoji icons that Apple had originally intended only for Japan. Emoji is defined in the astral planes so almost nothing at the time was capable of understanding them, yet were so irresistible that developers worldwide who would otherwise have done nothing to address their cultural biases immediately fixed everything overnight to have them. So thanks to cartoons, we now have a more inclusive world.
    - londons_explore 5y ago
      I'm pretty sure Unicode was pretty widespread before the iphone/emoji popularity.
      - cygx 5y ago
        There's supporting Unicode, and 'supporting' Unicode. If you're only dealing with western languages, it's easy to fall into the trap of only 'supporting' Unicode. Proper emoji handling will put things like grapheme clusters and zero-width joiners on your map.

by cygx 5y ago

jart 5y ago

Even the individual unicode codepoints themselves are variable width if we consider that things like cjk and emoji take up >1 monospace cells.

lanstin 5y ago
Every time I see one of these threads, my gratitude to only do backend grows. Human behavior is too complex, let the webdevs handle UI, and human languages are too complex, not sure what speciality handles that. Give me out of order packets and parsing code that skips a character if the packet length lines up just so any day. I am thankful that almost all the Unicode text I see is rendered properly now, farewell the little boxes. Good job lots of people.
- jart 5y ago
  I think we really have the iPhone jailbreakers to thank for that. U.S. developers were allergic almost offended by anything that wasn't ASCII and then someone released an app that unlocked the emoji icons that Apple had originally intended only for Japan. Emoji is defined in the astral planes so almost nothing at the time was capable of understanding them, yet were so irresistible that developers worldwide who would otherwise have done nothing to address their cultural biases immediately fixed everything overnight to have them. So thanks to cartoons, we now have a more inclusive world.
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    I'm pretty sure Unicode was pretty widespread before the iphone/emoji popularity.
    - cygx 5y ago
      There's supporting Unicode, and 'supporting' Unicode. If you're only dealing with western languages, it's easy to fall into the trap of only 'supporting' Unicode. Proper emoji handling will put things like grapheme clusters and zero-width joiners on your map.