Re: How to read in a (long) UTF-8 file, incrementally?

["Dmitry A. Kazakov" <mailbox@dmitry-kazakov.de>]

On 2021-11-16 12:55, Marius Amado-Alves wrote:
> I'm worried. I need the concept of character, for proper text processing.

Simply ignore or reject decomposed characters.

> For example, I want to reference characters in a text file by their position.

That is no problem either. There are two alternatives:

1. Fixed font representation. Reduce everything to normal glyphs, use 
string position corresponding to the beginning of an UTF-8 sequence.

2. Proportional font. Use a graphical user interface like GTK. The GTK 
text buffer has a data type (iterator) to indicate a place in the 
buffer, e.g. when a selection happens. These iterators are consistent 
with the glyphs as rendered on the screen and you can convert between 
them and string position.

> (For me, a combining character is not a character, the combination is. Unicode agrees, right?)

No, Unicode disagrees, e.g. É can be composed from E and acute accent. 
But it is advised just to ignore all this nonsense and consider:

    code point = character

-- 
Regards,
Dmitry A. Kazakov
http://www.dmitry-kazakov.de