From: Daniel DeLorme <dan-ml@...42.com>
Date: 2007-12-06T09:15:52+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode in Regex

marc wrote:
> Daniel DeLorme said...
>> MonkeeSage wrote:
>>> Everything in ruby is a bytestring.
>> YES! And that's exactyly how it should be. Who is it that spread the 
>> flawed idea that strings are fundamentally made of characters?
> 
> Are you being ironic?

Not at all. By "fundamentally" I mean the fundamental, lowest level of 
representation. If strings were fundamentally made of characters then we 
wouldn't be able to access individual bytes because that's a lower level 
than the fundamental level, which is by definition impossible.

If you are using UCS2 it makes sense to consider strings as arrays of 
characters because that's what they are. But UTF8 strings do not follow 
the characteristics of arrays at all. Each access into the "array" is 
O(n) rather than O(1). So IMHO treating it as an array of characters is 
a *very* leaky abstraction.

I agree that 99.9% of the time you want to deal with characters, and I 
believe that in 99% of those cases you would be better served with regex 
than this pretend "array" disguise.

Daniel