Re: Why do Glib::ustring::operator[] and at() return values, not references?

[Daniel Boles <dboles src gmail com>]

On 24 June 2017 at 19:12, Chris Vine <vine35792468 gmail com> wrote:

On Sat, 24 Jun 2017 19:08:36 +0100
Chris Vine <vine35792468 gmail com> wrote:

> It is because UTF-8 is a multibyte encoding, and any one character may
> require between 1 and 5 bytes to represent it.  If you were allowed to
> change a byte at will you would be able to introduce invalid encoding
> sequences.  As to the absense of documentation, maybe it is because
> this was thought to be self-evident, dunno.

And I should perhaps also make the point that these operators return a
32-bit unicode character, not a byte, which is consequent on the same
point.  If you allowed mutation, the length of the string (in bytes)
might change.

Right, of course. It does seem very obvious now. It seemed to completely slip my mind that we're dealing with characters of arbitrary width, not e.g. UTF-16. :( Thanks for the comprehensive answer to a stupid question!