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How many characters is "é́́"? To our eyes, one. But it's actually four code points (the e and three acute modifiers). This is the case whether you're using UTF-8 or UTF-16.

Regardless of the encoding you choose, you need to understand how it represents characters.

Also FYI, most programs don't display text on the screen. To most programs, text is a sequence of bytes to be shuffled around, and nothing more. Display and text manipulation is the minority case.



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