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From: "Luke A. Guest" <laguest@archeia.com>
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Subject: Re: How to read in a (long) UTF-8 file, incrementally?
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 2021 15:25:10 +0000
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On 16/11/2021 11:55, Marius Amado-Alves wrote:
> I'm worried. I need the concept of character, for proper text processing. For example, I want to reference characters in a text file by their position. Any tips/references on how to deal with combining characters, or any other perturbating feature of Unicode, greatly appreciated.
> 
> (For me, a combining character is not a character, the combination is. Unicode agrees, right?)
> 

You can't. The concept of character is dead, the new concept are 
grapheme clusters.