Comment on The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Must Know About Unicode in 2023 (Still No Excuses!)
Walnut356@programming.dev 8 months agoThat depends on your definition of correct lmao. Rust explicitly counts unicode scalar values, because that’s the length of the raw bytes contained in the string. There are many times where that value is more useful than the grapheme count.
Yeah, and as much as I understand the article saying there should be an easily accessible method for grapheme count, it’s also kind of mad to put something like this into a stdlib.
Its behaviour will break with each new Unicode standard. And you’d have to upgrade the whole stdlib to keep up-to-date with the newest Unicode standards.
It might make more sense to expose a standard library API for unicode data provided by (and updated with) the operating system. Something like the time zone database.
Black616Angel@feddit.de 8 months ago
And rust also has the “🤦”.chars().count() which returns 1.
I would rather argue that rust should not have a simple len function for strings, but since str is only a byte slice it works that way.
Also also the len function clearly states:
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 8 months ago
None of these languages should have generic len() or size() for strings, come to think of it. It should always be something explicit like bytes() or chars() or graphemes(). But they’re there for legacy reasons.
Knusper@feddit.de 8 months ago
That Rust function returns the number of codepoints, not the number of graphemes, which is rarely useful. You need to use a facepalm emoji with skin color modifiers to see the difference.
The way to get a proper grapheme count in Rust is e.g. via this library: crates.io/crates/unicode-segmentation
Djehngo@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Makes sense, the code-points split is stable; meaning it’s fine to put in the standard library, the grapheme split changes every year so the volatility is probably better off in a crate.
Knusper@feddit.de 8 months ago
Yeah, although having now seen two commenters with relatively high confidence claiming that counting codepoints ought be enough…
…and me almost having been the third such commenter, had I not decided to read the article first…
…I’m starting to feel more and more like the stdlib should force you through all kinds of hoops to get anything resembling a size of a string, so that you gladly search for a library.
Like, I’ve worked with decoding strings quite a bit in the past, I felt like I had an above average understanding of Unicode as a result. And I was still only vaguely aware of graphemes.