From: Peter Kirk (peterkirk@qaya.org)
Date: Tue Oct 07 2003 - 05:20:27 CST
On 07/10/2003 02:35, Jill Ramonsky wrote:
>
> Knowing the number of characters won't help you one iota. What you
> need to know here is the number of default grapheme clusters.
> I still have yet to hear a useful purpose for counting the number of
> /characters/.
>
> Jill
>
Suppose I have a UTF-8 string and want to know how many default grapheme
clusters it contains. How do I do so? Well, I step through the string
character by character, combining successive characters into grapheme
clusters. To do this without having to decode the UTF-8 myself, I need
to be able to get at the string character by character, and very likely
use a loop based on the number of characters in the string, e.g. the
following Basic (horrid language but good for making my point here):
For i% = 1 to Len(utf8string$)
c$ = Mid(utf8string$, i%, 1)
Process c$
Next i%
Such a loop would be more efficient in UTF-32 of course, but this is
still a real need for working with character counts.
-- Peter Kirk peter@qaya.org (personal) peterkirk@qaya.org (work) http://www.qaya.org/
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