this post was submitted on 02 Oct 2023
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For what it's worth, the documentation is very very clear on what these methods return. It explicitly redirects you to crates.io for splitting into grapheme clusters. It would be much better to have it in std, but I understand the argument that Std should only contain stable stuff.
As a systems programming language the .len() method should return the byte count IMO.
The problem is when you think you know stuff, but you don't. I knew that counting bytes doesn't work, but thought the number of codepoints was what I want. And then knowing that Rust uses UTF-8 internally, it's logical that
.chars().count()gives the number of codepoints. No need to read documentation, if you're so smart. ๐It does give you the correct length in quite a lot of cases, too. Even the byte length looks correct for ASCII characters.
So, yeah, this would require a lot more consideration whether it's worth it, but I'm mostly thinking there'd be no
.len()on the String type itself, and instead to get the byte count, you'd have to do.as_bytes().len().