Emoji.length == 2

Post by smackfu » Sat, Mar 11, 2017, 12:44 PM UTC

piersadrian wrote: post #56

Joeri wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is most definitely not a solved problem, because graphemes (visual symbols) are a poor way to deal with unicode in the real world. Pretty much all systems either deal with the length in bytes (if they're old-style C), in code units / byte pairs (if they're UTF-16 based, like windows, java and javascript), or in unicode code points (if they're UTF-8 based, like every proper system should be). Dealing with the len…

I would point you to Swift's implementation of its "Character" type. Swift string handling is a model for how programming languages should approach Unicode characters and their complex combinations. The standard interface into all Swift strings is its "Character" type, which works exclusively with grapheme clusters. [1] https://developer.apple.com/library/content/documentation/Sw...

Post by carapace » Sun, Mar 12, 2017, 1:34 AM UTC

Manishearth wrote: post #138

carapace wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unicode is a conflation of two ideas, one good and the other impossible. The good idea is to have a standard mapping from numbers to little pictures (glyphs, symbols, kanji, ideograms, cuneiform pokings in dried clay, scratches on a rock, whatever.) This is really all ASCII was. The impossible idea is to encode human languages into bits. This can't be done and will only continue to cause heartache in those who try. A…

I hate this argument every time I see it because it's invariably used in the wrong place. Yes, the goal of encoding all human languages into bits is one that's near impossible. Unicode tries, and has broken half-solutions in many places. Lots of heartache everywhere. This is completely irrelevant to the discussion here. The issue of code points not always mapping to graphemes is only an issue because programmers igno…

Post by carapace » Mon, Mar 13, 2017, 10:48 PM UTC

Manishearth wrote: post #164

carapace wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's a completely solved problem, theoretically speaking. lol. Unicode was ambitious for its time, but naive. Today we know better. It "jumped the shark" when the pizza slice showed up and has only been getting stupider since. Eventually it will go the way of XML (yes, I know XML hasn't gone anywhere, shut up) and we will be using some JSON hottness (forgive the labored metaphor please!) that probably consist of a…

Again. Yes, "it jumped the shark when the pizza slice showed up". However, that doesn't imply that it did everything wrong. The notion of multi-codepoint characters is necessary to handle other languages. that is a solved problem, it's just that programmers mess up when dealing with it. Emoji may be a mistake, but the underlying "problems" caused by emoji existed anyway, and they're not really problems, just programm…