Re: G_UTF8String: Boxed Type Proposal

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Fri, 18 Mar 2016 10:19:08 -0400
Randall Sawyer <srandallsawyer hushmail me> wrote:
> Also - I just discovered that glibmm has a class Glib::ustring 
> (https://developer.gnome.org/glibmm/stable/classGlib_1_1ustring.html).
> I am going to take a look through its source to see what they have
> there.

It does, although I have stopped using it except for cases where the
API demands it, in favour of std::string (the equivalent for C being
char*)

Sure, Glib::ustring tells you the number of unicode code points in the
string, but so what?  That knowledge is mostly useless.  When people
refer to a "character" they normally really mean a grapheme rather than
a code point.  However with combining characters, Hangul jamos, Indic
consonant clusters and other grapheme clusters, any given "character"
in this sense can require more than one code point and cannot be
displayed correctly without them.  Knowing the number of code points
doesn't help you.

Chris