Why is the length of this string longer than the number of characters in it?

Question

This code:

string a = \"abc\";
string b = \"A         


        

Answer 1

This is because length() only works for Unicode code points that are no larger than U+FFFF. This set of code points is known as the Basic Multilingual Plane (BMP) and uses only 2 bytes.

Unicode code points outside of the BMP are represented in UTF-16 using 4 byte surrogate pairs.

To correctly count the number of characters (3), use StringInfo

StringInfo b = new StringInfo("A