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> what to you think "ẇ͓̞͒͟͡ǫ̠̠̉̏͠͡ͅr̬̺͚̍͛̔͒͢d̠͎̗̳͇͆̋̊͂͐".length should be? This is a nice example of the kind of thing we need to think about when defining a m

• danbruc 3y ago
  Four. Obviously. The more interesting question is whether the Unicode rules actually give that answer. EDIT: Just checked it using the first online tool [1] that came up and it indeed says four. So all is good. [1] https://onlinetools.com/unicode/extract-unicode-graphemes https://onlinetools.com/unicode/extract-unicode-graphemes
  • masklinn 3y ago
    It should be 4 as long as you count the grapheme clusters which is what e.g. Swift does (hence String#count being O(n)). In Javascript, you can get the same information through Intl.Segmenter, segments by grapheme cluster by default.
    • danbruc 3y ago
      You could also have it in O(1), just store and maintain it as you usually store the length in bytes or code units. If you had all your string operations like substring work with grapheme clusters by default, which might arguably make sense quite often, then that could actually be a good decision. It might even make sense to maintain a list with pointers to each grapheme cluster or of all the grapheme cluster lengths together with the actual string data. Or maybe not, would probably depend heavily on the workload.