3 ms·

Size of a tweet?

• DenseComet 5y ago
  The 280 character limit in a tweet isn't equal to the number of glyphs in a tweet. https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/counting-characters https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/counting-characters
  • garmaine 5y ago
    But the point is it ought to be. Tell a user they have "a 280 character limit" and the intuitive interpretation for 98% of the world population that doesn't know the intricacies of Unicode is "a limit of 280 visible characters." That's what Twitter's tweet limit ought to be, and if there was an easy, culturally neutral algorithm for it I'm sure that's what they would have done.
    • detaro 5y ago
      Twitter clearly has chosen to intentionally deviate from it. E.g. what they specify on that page is not "unicode code points" either, but indeed their own mapping of "this character is worth that many points".
      • garmaine 5y ago
        From what that page describes, it appears Twitter's algorithm is in fact "number of unicode code points" except for specific carve-out cases which are so obscenely unfair by that metric as to justify counting differently. E.g. counting Unihan characters as two makes the 280 character limit in these languages be approximately the same limit on information as western languages, since they are about twice as compact in terms of information density. And emojis are an insane amount of unicode code points, particularly when modifiers are applied. Etc.
        • detaro 5y ago
          hm, yeah, you're right, the foundation is strongly codepoints and it seems they otherwise rely on the normalization rule.