I have a UTF-8 encoded char*.
Is there a standard function to calculate the number of visible characters represented by the byte array?
I'm on Red Hat (RHEL 5).
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69answers:
2
+1
A:
Yes, glib.h, has g_utf8_strlen()
Check out this page for more information (including three implementations of an algo to do this)
Evan Carroll
2010-06-07 20:17:31
The documentation you pointed to doesn't indicate whether it counts non-independent characters like combining characters or diacritics. Do you know whether it does?
Bill
2010-06-07 21:02:48
I think the utf8 parlance for what you speak of is graphemes, without the use of that term I would not take it to mean combining characters or diacritics.
Evan Carroll
2010-06-07 21:55:30
g_utf8_strlen() only counts code points within a UTF-8 string. Thus, if you had "e\u0341" (U+0341 is a combining acute accent), you'd get 2, while the string itself will display as é.
Thanatos
2010-06-08 00:12:14
That whole second link seems to be a lesson in premature optimization.
Thanatos
2010-06-08 00:16:59
I disagree with this latter remark. Library code is wholly different from application code: it ought to be as fast as possible or it'll be shunned from critical performance code. Furthermore, I would argue it's not premature in the sense that it's been thought and measured and is not the result of a misconception.
Matthieu M.
2010-06-08 06:21:16
+1
A:
Check the iconv library: man iconv_open. One can convert the utf-8 string into say UCS-2 or UCS-4 where characters are of the same size. iconv is also (relatively) portable and not Linux or GNU specific.
If Glib, suggested before, is available to you (beware: it is GPLed) then use it as it is a better way.
Dummy00001
2010-06-07 23:58:23