Re:Strings – Dive Into Python 3
by ygra on Friday May 10, 2013 @11:59AM
(#5686909)
As your parent already noted, thinking of it as a sequence of code points goes wrong when you need to truncate a string in between a base and a combining character.
[ Parent
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Not true. Take this string:
d͊
It is composed of two code points: U+0064 and U+034A. The second code point is a combining character. The two code points together form one glyph. The term "character" is confusing because people use different definitions for it, I avoid using it, but the term Unicode code point is very clear.
Python 3's strings is a sequence of code points. The above string is represented like this:
>>> print("d\u034A")
d͊
>>> len("d\u034A")
2
>>> "d\u034a"[0]
'd'
>>> "d\u034a"[1]
'͊'Except it doesn't work as expected because users generally expect graphemes to stay as they are instead of losing random diacritics.