Question

I’m finding a way to count special character that form by more than one character but found no solution online!

For e.g. I want to count the string “வாழைப்பழம”. It actually consist of 6 tamil character but its 9 character in this case when we use the normal way to find the length. I am wondering is tamil the only kind of encoding that will cause this problem and if there is a solution to this. I’m currently trying to find a solution in C#.

Thank you in advance =)

Answer 1

Use StringInfo.LengthInTextElements:

var text = "வாழைப்பழம";
Console.WriteLine(text.Length);                               // 9
Console.WriteLine(new StringInfo(text).LengthInTextElements); // 6

The explanation for this behaviour can be found in the documentation of String.Length:

The Length property returns the number of Char objects in this instance, not the number of Unicode characters. The reason is that a Unicode character might be represented by more than one Char. Use the System.Globalization.StringInfo class to work with each Unicode character instead of each Char.