size of a string in bytes
ag0aep6g via Digitalmars-d-learn
digitalmars-d-learn at puremagic.com
Sat Jan 28 11:09:01 PST 2017
On Saturday, 28 January 2017 at 18:04:58 UTC, Nestor wrote:
> I believe I saw somewhere that in D a char was not neccesarrily
> the same as an ubyte because chars sometimes take more than one
> byte,
In D, a `char` is a UTF-8 code unit. Its size is one byte,
exactly and always.
A `char` is not a "character" in the common meaning of the word.
There's a more specialized word for "character" as a visual unit:
grapheme. For example, 'Ä' is a grapheme (a visual unit, a
"character"), but there is no single `char` for it. To encode 'Ä'
in UTF-8, a sequence of multiple code units is used.
> so since a string is an array of chars, I thought length
> behaved like walkLength (which I had not seen), in other words,
> that it simply returned the amount of elements in the array.
The elements of a `string` are (immutable) `char`s. That is,
`string` is an array of UTF-8 code units. It's not an array of
graphemes.
A `string`'s .length gives you the number of `char`s in it, i.e.
the number of UTF-8 code units, i.e. the number of bytes.
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