• Black616Angel
    link
    fedilink
    161 year 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:

    This length is in bytes, not chars or graphemes. In other words, it might not be what a human considers the length of the string.

    • lemmyvore
      link
      fedilink
      English
      111 year 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.

      • @Djehngo@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        91 year 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
          link
          fedilink
          71 year 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.

          • Turun
            link
            fedilink
            11 year ago

            For what it’s worth, the documentation is very very clear on what these methods return. It explicitly redirects you to crates.io for splitting into grapheme clusters. It would be much better to have it in std, but I understand the argument that Std should only contain stable stuff.

            As a systems programming language the .len() method should return the byte count IMO.

            • @Knusper@feddit.de
              link
              fedilink
              21 year ago

              The problem is when you think you know stuff, but you don’t. I knew that counting bytes doesn’t work, but thought the number of codepoints was what I want. And then knowing that Rust uses UTF-8 internally, it’s logical that .chars().count() gives the number of codepoints. No need to read documentation, if you’re so smart. 🙃

              It does give you the correct length in quite a lot of cases, too. Even the byte length looks correct for ASCII characters.

              So, yeah, this would require a lot more consideration whether it’s worth it, but I’m mostly thinking there’d be no .len() on the String type itself, and instead to get the byte count, you’d have to do .as_bytes().len().