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Merge pull request #1260 from mar-v-in/xep-0426

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XEP-0426: Character Counting 0.3.0
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@ -13,19 +13,21 @@
</abstract>
&LEGALNOTICE;
<number>0426</number>
<status>Deferred</status>
<status>Experimental</status>
<type>Informational</type>
<sig>Standards</sig>
<approver>Council</approver>
<dependencies/>
<supersedes/>
<supersededby/>
<shortname>charcount</shortname>
<author>
<firstname>Marvin</firstname>
<surname>Wissfeld</surname>
<email>xsf@larma.de</email>
<jid>jabber@larma.de</jid>
</author>
&larma;
<revision>
<version>0.3.0</version>
<date>2022-12-27</date>
<initials>lmw</initials>
<remark>Added section about subsequences.</remark>
</revision>
<revision>
<version>0.2.0</version>
<date>2020-01-02</date>
@ -165,47 +167,80 @@
across platforms and as such should be used with care.
</p>
</section2>
<section2 topic='Rationale' anchor='rationale'>
<p>
The most obvious way of counting characters is to count them how humans
would. This sounds easy when only having western scripts in mind but becomes
more complicated in other scripts and most importantly is not well-defined
across Unicode versions. New unicode versions regularly added new
possibilities to build grapheme clusters, including from existing code
points. To be forward compatible, counting grapheme clusters, graphemes,
glyphs or similar is thus not an option.
This leaves basically the two options of using the number of code units of
the encoded string or the number of code points.
</p>
<p>
The main advantage of using the code units would be that those are native to
many programming languages, easing the task for developers.
However programming languages do not share a common encoding for their
string type (C/C++ use UTF-8, C#/Java use UTF-16, Python 3 hides the
internal encoding from the developer and only presents it in code points),
so there is no best pick here.
If one was to choose an encoding, the best choice would be UTF-8, the native
encoding of XMPP. However this makes counting bytes a more complex task for
programming languages that use a different encoding like UTF-16, as strings
would need to be transcoded first.
</p>
<p>
Counting code points has the advantage that offset counts cannot point
inside a code point. This could happen when using code units of any encoding
that may use more than one unit to represent a code point (such as UTF-8 and
UTF-16).
If an offset count points inside a code point, that would be an invalid
offset, raising more uncertainty of the correct behavior in such cases. Most
notably the opportunity of splitting (as it exists for grapheme cluster) is
not an option in that case, because splitting a code point would not create
any usable output.
Counting code points is widely supported in programming languages and can
easily be implemented for encoded strings when not.
The &w3xml; standard also defines a character as a unicode code point, thus
counting code points is equivalent to counting XML characters.
</p>
</section2>
</section1>
<section1 topic='Rationale' anchor='rationale'>
<section1 topic='Subsequences' anchor='subsequence'>
<p>
The most obvious way of counting characters is to count them how humans
would. This sounds easy when only having western scripts in mind but becomes
more complicated in other scripts and most importantly is not well-defined
across Unicode versions. New unicode versions regularly added new
possibilities to build grapheme clusters, including from existing code
points. To be forward compatible, counting grapheme clusters, graphemes,
glyphs or similar is thus not an option.
This leaves basically the two options of using the number of code units of
the encoded string or the number of code points.
</p>
<p>
The main advantage of using the code units would be that those are native to
many programming languages, easing the task for developers.
However programming languages do not share a common encoding for their
string type (C/C++ use UTF-8, C#/Java use UTF-16, Python 3 hides the
internal encoding from the developer and only presents it in code points),
so there is no best pick here.
If one was to choose an encoding, the best choice would be UTF-8, the native
encoding of XMPP. However this makes counting bytes a more complex task for
programming languages that use a different encoding like UTF-16, as strings
would need to be transcoded first.
</p>
<p>
Counting code points has the advantage that offset counts cannot point
inside a code point. This could happen when using code units of any encoding
that may use more than one unit to represent a code point (such as UTF-8 and
UTF-16).
If an offset count points inside a code point, that would be an invalid
offset, raising more uncertainty of the correct behavior in such cases. Most
notably the opportunity of splitting (as it exists for grapheme cluster) is
not an option in that case, because splitting a code point would not create
any usable output.
Counting code points is widely supported in programming languages and can
easily be implemented for encoded strings when not.
The &w3xml; standard also defines a character as a unicode code point, thus
counting code points is equivalent to counting XML characters.
When referencing a subsequence of the characters of a message body, the
begin and end of the subsequence should be provided by two numbers, denoting
the number of characters (counted as described above) before the begin of the
subsequence or before the end of the subsequence, respectively. In other
words, the begin is the index of the first character in the subsequence and
the end is the index following the last character in the subsequence. That
means, if a subsequence covers the full body, its begin should be given as
0 and its end should be given as the number of characters in the body.
</p>
<section2 topic='Developer notes' anchor='subsequence-developer-notes'>
<p>
Subsequence indexing in various programming languages match the convention
described here. When using Python, the subsequence created by
<tt>body[begin:end]</tt> matches all requirements of this document.
</p>
<p>
Some programming languages define subsequences by offset and length. In
this case, begin matchs the offset while end-begin matches the length.
</p>
</section2>
<section2 topic='Rationale' anchor='subsequence-rationale'>
<p>
The convention for subsequences was choosen because it has three main
advantages: It matches subsequence indexing in various programming
languages, end minus begin of a subsequence equal the length of the
subsequence and the end of the first of two adjacent subsequence matches the
begin of the second one.
</p>
</section2>
</section1>
<section1 topic='Glossary' anchor='glossary'>