[est]

Yes? `System.Globalizatiion` or `ICU` can count grapheme, what's your point?

Those libraries are equivalent to normalize( utf16 `0x00 0x41 0x03 0x08`) == length 1

Back to my top comment, I stated that UCS2 counts faster than UTf8 internally, because every BMP code point is just two bytes, what's wrong here? If variable-length is so good why py3k is using UCS-4 internally? (Wich means every character is exactly 32 bits. There, I said character again.)

[masklinn]

> Back to my top comment, I stated that UCS2 counts faster than UTf8 internally

The part cmccabe tries to explain, and which you repeatedly fail to understand, is that UCS2 counts unicode code points faster than UTF-8, which is completely useless because "characters" (what the end-user sees as a single sub-unit of text) often spans multiple codepoints, so counting codepoints is essentially a recipe for broken code and nothing else.

> If variable-length is so good why py3k is using UCS-4 internally?

It's not. Before 3.3 it used either UCS2 or UCS4 internally, as did Python 2, since Python 3.3 it switches the internal encoding on the fly.

> Wich means every character is exactly 32 bits. There, I said character again.

yeah and you're wrong again.

[est]

> yeah and you're wrong again.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32

UTF-32 (or UCS-4) is a protocol to encode Unicode characters that uses exactly 32 bits per Unicode code point.

http://www.unicode.org/faq/utf_bom.html#utf32-1