Basically title, the length of unicode characters as calculated by the len() function is off by one, for example
:echo len("à")
2
or
:echo len("°")
2
is there a way to fix this, maybe by setting some options?
-
There’s lots of resources that discuss the complications of counting length of unicode strings, but I can’t find one. It matters how you count: bytes? “Characters”? But some characters are combining and you don’t see them as you might think... etc. – D. Ben Knoble♦ Aug 14 '20 at 23:40
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Funny, I'm used to using len() to count items in a list but it turns out it's valid to pass a string, too, in which case the function returns length in bytes. I would use strlen() for that but either one works per documentation for len():
When
{expr}is a String or a Number the length in bytes is used, as withstrlen().
Anyways, it sounds like you want to count characters instead. strlen() has a sibling named strchars() that does just that. Using your example string...
:echo strchars("°")
...displays "1". That solves the "off by one" result you described, I think.
Related to DBK's observations in his comment, the function also takes an optional second parameter (Vim version >= 7.4.755) that dictates whether composing characters are counted or not. Quoting the function's docs, when {skipcc} is...
- ...omitted or zero, composing characters are counted separately.
- ...set to 1, Composing characters are ignored.
Not sure whether that part is relevant to you or not.
