UTF-8 Character Count

Question

I\'m programming something that counts the number of UTF-8 characters in a file. I\'ve already written the base code but now, I\'m stuck in the part where the characters are su

Answer 1

You could look into the specs: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc3629.

Chapter 3 has this table in it:

   Char. number range  |        UTF-8 octet sequence
      (hexadecimal)    |              (binary)
   --------------------+---------------------------------------------
   0000 0000-0000 007F | 0xxxxxxx
   0000 0080-0000 07FF | 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
   0000 0800-0000 FFFF | 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
   0001 0000-0010 FFFF | 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

You could inspect the bytes and build the unicode characters.

A different point is, whether you would count a base character and its accent (combining mark cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combining_character) as one or as several characters.