Should len(string) return the number of graphemes, or the number of codepoints?

[christianp]

In unicode, graphemes might be represented by a sequence of several codepoints. For example, the emoji 🫶 is two codepoints: \ud83e\udef6.

Should the length of a string in JME count graphemes or codepoints? I think the least-surprising answer from a human's perspective is graphemes, but that means that all the methods for indexing and slicing strings need to be grapheme-aware.

[christianp]

Blog posts on how this is dealt with in different languages:

• Rust - https://tomdebruijn.com/posts/rust-string-length-width-calculations/
• Elixir - https://programmingzen.com/string-length-in-elixir/

Libraries to deal with grapheme clusters:

• Python - https://pypi.org/project/grapheme/
• JavaScript - https://github.com/orling/grapheme-splitter

There is a proposal to add an Intl.Segmenter interface to JS to deal with this.