Count number of characters present in foreign language

Question

Is there any optimal way to implement character count for non English letters? For example, if we take the word \"Mother\" in English, it is a 6 letter wor

Answer 1

You can ignore combining marks in the count calculation with this function:

function charCount( str ) {
    var re = /[\u0300-\u036f\u1dc0-\u1dff\u20d0-\u20ff\ufe20-\ufe2f\u0b82\u0b83\u0bbe\u0bbf\u0bc0-\u0bc2\u0bc6-\u0bc8\u0bca-\u0bcd\u0bd7]/g
    return str.replace( re, "").length;
}

console.log(charCount('மதர்'))// 3

//More tests on random Tamil text:
//Paint the text character by character to verify, for instance 'யெ' is a single character, not 2

console.log(charCount("மெய்யெழுத்துக்கள்")); //9
console.log(charCount("ஒவ்வொன்றுடனும்")); //8
console.log(charCount("தமிழ்")); //3
console.log(charCount("வருகின்றனர்.")); //8
console.log(charCount("எழுதப்படும்")); //7

The Tamil signs and marks are not composed into single characters with their target character in unicode, so normalization wouldn't help. I have added all the Tamil combining marks or signs manually to the regex, but it also includes the ranges for normal combining marks, so charCount("ä") is 1 regardless of normalization form.