Suppose I have a UTF-8 string and want to know how many default grapheme clusters it contains. How do I do so? Well, I step through the string character by character, combining successive characters into grapheme clusters. To do this without having to decode the UTF-8 myself, I need to be able to get at the string character by character, and very likely use a loop based on the number of characters in the string, e.g. the following Basic (horrid language but good for making my point here):
Knowing the number of characters won't help you one iota. What you need to know here is the number of default grapheme clusters.
I still have yet to hear a useful purpose for counting the number of /characters/.
Jill
For i% = 1 to Len(utf8string$) c$ = Mid(utf8string$, i%, 1) Process c$ Next i%
Such a loop would be more efficient in UTF-32 of course, but this is still a real need for working with character counts.
-- Peter Kirk [EMAIL PROTECTED] (personal) [EMAIL PROTECTED] (work) http://www.qaya.org/
