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A comment on Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk. Parent comment

Re:Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk by valleyer on Saturday August 20, 2022 @02:51PM (#32534310)
It's a fixed size per codepoint. Many clusters that appear atomic in a text editor are made up of multiple codepoints. The flag emojis are among the many examples.
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Re:Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk by thrown_22 on Saturday August 20, 2022 @09:19PM (#32536578)
UTF-8 is this magic ball of mud that somehow managed to convince people overstrikes were stupid and then implemented them so exuberantly that you can have a single glyph represented by half a dozen of them.
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Re:Brian Kernighan adds Unicode support to Awk by ekimekim on Saturday August 20, 2022 @11:22PM (#32537128)
To nitpick: Overstrikes/other combining characters and the multiple possible ways to represent the same glyph are aspects of Unicode, the character set which deals with code points from 0 to 0x10ffff. Whereas UTF-8 is a way of encoding that character set into a sequence of bytes. The things you describe are present in all unicode encodings.
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