On 11/11/19 12:13 PM, Simon Slavin wrote: > On 11 Nov 2019, at 4:02pm, Igor Tandetnik <i...@tandetnik.org> wrote: > >> And then what do you do with that count? What do you use it for? > This is a key point. When I started programming I used to do LEFT(A$(I), 14) > frequently. But almost all of them were because I wanted to print the string > and had allocated 14 characters of space to in. > > Then came variable-width fonts. The practise should have died out. But > people are still doing it. > > There are other reasons to get the beginning of a string. The first > character alone, especially. There may be other reasons to get its length. > But it was mostly done because the length of the string was its width on the > display. And it isn't any more.
And you do understand that getting the first 'character' (if you mean the first printed glyph) of a string in UTF-32 is not trivial, because it could easily be more than one code-point due to combining characters. For many purposes it might not even include the first code-point, as that might be a formatting meta-point like the BOM or a text-direction code which should be skipped. -- Richard Damon _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@mailinglists.sqlite.org http://mailinglists.sqlite.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
