The article is only for demonstrating how standard library works (it was the first Google result for me). The point is we shouldn't need to convert a string to an array of characters to manipulate it.
> The point is we shouldn't need to convert a string to an array
Yes we should. Unicode strings have ambiguous lengths. I would encourage you to try slicing Unicode strings sometime to understand why this is true.
Consider the black Santa emoji. What is the length of that emoji? Backspacing an emoji deletes it, so it could be one. But then how would you substring slice out the skin color component of the emoji?
Converting a string to an array yields the symbols on the screen separated by the cursor position, but that’s not a true representation of the data.
When one speaks about "string slicing" they don't mean stripping the skin colour of an emoji. If there is a black Santa emoji in a string, I want to keep that Santa black. I am not interested whether it's a composite emoji or not.
The simple syntax should cover 99% of use cases and there should be a special, more advanced syntax for the rest, one that you'd use if you are writing an Emoji parser.
No, it's not overengineering. It's working with unicode. You have to let go of the idea that a string is a sequence of characters separated by where your cursor pauses. It's not. Black Santa was a simple metaphor for more real-world scenarios such the chinese language, in which multiple characters form to create a new character.
Imagine if you had a Color key on your keyboard, and a Santa key on your keyboard. Each key individually has meaning. When the two characters are positioned adjacent to each other, you get SkinColorSanta as one single character.
What is the new length of your string? Two for each original Color and Santa characters? Or 1 because there is only one icon the represents the two together? Remember Swift interops with C, so what is the size when you need to drop to char*? Hope you don't plan to use 1!
How would you solve this problem? Swift is open source. Make a PR if you have a better solution.
