It gets more complicated if you do substring operations.
If I do s.charAt(x) or s.codePointAt(x) or s.substring(x, y), I'd like to know which values for x and y are valid and which aren't.
If I do s.charAt(x) or s.codePointAt(x) or s.substring(x, y), I'd like to know which values for x and y are valid and which aren't.
If you take a substring of a(bc) and compare it to string (bc) are you looking for bitwise equivalence or logical equivalence? If the former it's a bit easier (you can just memcmp) but if the latter you have to perform a normalization to one of the canonical forms.
I feel like if you’re looking for bitwise equivalence or similar, you should have to cast to some kind of byte array and access the corresponding operations accordingly
UTF-8 is a byte code format; Unicode is not. In Python, where all strings are arrays of Unicode code points, substrings are likewise arrays of Unicode code points.
(Also that's not what "character" means in the Unicode framework--some code points correspond to characters and some don't.)
P.S. Everything about the response to this comment is wrong, especially the absurd baseless claim that I misunderstood the claim that I quoted and corrected (that's the only claim I responded to).
My comment explains that you have misunderstood what the claim is. "Byte code format" was nonsensical (Unicode is not interpreted by a VM), but the point that comment was trying to make (as I understood it) is that not all subsequences of a valid sequence of (assigned) code points are valid.
> Also that's not what "character" means in the Unicode framework--some code points correspond to characters and some don't.
My definition does not contradict that. A code point is an integer in the Unicode code space which may correspond to a character. When it does, "character" trivially means the thing that the code point corresponds to, i.e., represents, as I said.
Neither of these are really useful unless you are implementing a font renderer or low level Unicode algorithm - and even then you usually only want to get the next code point rather than one at an arbitrary position.