4 ms·

What if you need to find 5 letter words to play wordle? Why do you care how many bytes they occupy or how large they are on screen?

• taneq 1y ago
  If you're playing at this level, you need to define: - letter - word - 5 :P
  • guappa 1y ago
    Eh in macedonian they have some letters that in russian are just 2 separate letters
    • CorrectHorseBat 1y ago
      In German you have the same, only within one language. ß can be written as ss if it isn't available in a font, and only in 2017 they added a capital version. So depending the font and the unicode version the number of letters can differ.
      • guappa 1y ago
        should "ß" == "ss" evaluate as true?
        • birn559 1y ago
          I don't see why it should. I also believe parent is wrong as there are unambiguous rules about when to use ß or ss. Never thought of it but maybe there are rules that allow to visually present the code point for ß as ss? At least (from experience as a user) there seem to be a singular "ss" codepoint.
          • guappa 1y ago
            well I don't speak german, I was asking
            • birn559 1y ago
              I see, wasn't clear to me on what level you were asking. The letter ß has never been generally equivalent to ss in the German language. From a user experience perspective though it might be beneficial to pretend that "ß" == "ss" holds when parsing user input.
          • CorrectHorseBat 1y ago
            >also believe parent is wrong as there are unambiguous rules about when to use ß or ss. I never said it was ambiguous, I said it depends on the unicode version and the font you are using. How is that wrong? (Seems like the capital of ß is still SS in the latest unicode but since ẞ is the preferred capital version now this should change in the future)
            • birn559 1y ago
              > How is that wrong? Not sure where, how or if it's defined as part of Unicode, but so far I assumed that for a Unicode grapheme there exists a notion of what the visual representation should look like. If Unicode still defines capital of ß as SS that's an error in Unicode due to slow adaption of the changes in the German language.
              • CorrectHorseBat 1y ago
                In unicode the default is still SS [1] while the Germans seem to have changed it to ẞ [2]. That means now it's the same on every system, but once the unicode standard changes and some systems get updated and others not there will be different behavior of len("ß".upper()) around. I don't know how or if systems deal with this, but ß should be printed as ss if ß is unavailable in the font. It's possible this is completely up to the user. [1] https://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html https://unicode.org/faq/casemap_charprop.html [2] https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/RfdR_Amtliches-Regelwerk_2024.pdf https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/RfdR_Amtliches-Regelwerk...
                • weinzierl 1y ago
                  "In unicode the default is still SS [1] while the Germans seem to have changed it to ẞ [2]." Where does the source corroborate that claim? Can you give is a hint where to find the source?
                  • CorrectHorseBat 1y ago
                    page 48: > E3: Bei Schreibung mit Großbuchstaben ist neben der Verwendung des Groß buchstabens ẞ auch die Schreibung SS möglich: Straße – STRAẞE – STRASSE. While in older versions [1] it was the other way around: > E3: Bei Schreibung mit Großbuchstaben schreibt man SS. Daneben ist auch die Verwendung des Großbuchstabens ẞ möglich. Beispiel: Straße – STRASSE – STRAẞE. [1] https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/rfdr_Regeln_2016_redigiert_2018.pdf https://www.rechtschreibrat.com/DOX/rfdr_Regeln_2016_redigie...
      • kbelder 1y ago
        "Traditionally, ⟨ß⟩ did not have a capital form, and was capitalized as ⟨SS⟩. Some type designers introduced capitalized variants. In 2017, the Council for German Orthography officially adopted a capital form ⟨ẞ⟩ as an acceptable variant, ending a long debate." Thanks, that is interesting!
    • taneq 1y ago
      Niße. ;)
    • int_19h 1y ago
      That's not really any different than the distinction (or lack thereof) between "ae" and "æ". For that matter, in Russian there is a letter "ы" which is historically a digraph consisting of two separately letters "ъ" and "i" that just happens to be treated as a single letter for so long that few people would even recognize it as a digraph. This kind of stuff is all language-specific, which is why for Worlde etc you always need to be aware of the context, and this context will then unambiguously decide what constitutes a single letter.
• xigoi 1y ago
  In the case of Wordle, you know the exact set of letters you’re going to be using, which easily determines how to compute length.
  • guappa 1y ago
    No no, I want to create tomorrow's puzzle.
    • tomsmeding 1y ago
      As the parent said: > In the case of Wordle, you know the exact set of letters you’re going to be using This holds for the generator side too. In fact, you have a fixed word list, and the fixed alphabet tells you what a "letter" is, and thus how to compute length. Because this concerns natural language, this will coincide with grapheme clusters, and with English Wordle, that will in turn correspond to byte length because it won't give you words with é (I think). In different languages the grapheme clusters might be larger than 1 byte (e.g. [1], where they're codepoints).