On Sat, Mar 7, 2015 at 12:33 AM, <random...@fastmail.us> wrote: > However, when do you _really_ want the number of characters? You may > want to use it for, for example, the number of columns in a 'monospace' > font, which you've already screwed up because you haven't accounted for > double-wide characters or combining marks. Or you may want the position > that pressing an arrow key or backspace or forward-delete a number of > times will reach, which has its own rules in e.g. Indic languages (and > also fails on Latin with combining marks).
Number of code points is the most logical way to length-limit something. If you want to allow users to set their display names but not to make arbitrarily long ones, limiting them to X code points is the safest way (and preferably do an NFC or NFD normalization before counting, for consistency); this means you disallow pathological cases where every base character has innumerable combining marks added. ChrisA -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
