The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!)

snaggen@programming.dev to Programming@programming.dev – 278 points –
tonsky.me
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The way UTF-8 works is fixed though, isn't it? A new Unicode standard should not change that, so as long as the string is UTF-8 encoded, you can determine the character count without needing to have the latest Unicode standard.

Plus in Rust, you can instead use .chars().count() as Rust's char type is UTF-8 Unicode encoded, thus strings are as well.

turns out one should read the article before commenting

No offense, but did you read the article?

You should at least read the section "Wouldn’t UTF-32 be easier for everything?" and the following two sections for the context here.

So, everything you've said is correct, but it's irrelevant for the grapheme count.
And you should pretty much never need to know the number of codepoints.

yup, my bad. Frankly I thought grapheme meant something else, rather stupid of me. I think I understand the issue now and agree with you.

No worries, I almost commented here without reading the article, too, and did not really know what graphemes are beforehand either. 🫠

Nope, the article says that what is and is not a grapheme cluster changes between unicode versions each year :)