Character

Characters are a single Unicode extended grapheme cluster, represented by the char type. This means that characters can take up multiple bytes, like emojis or CJK characters. The benefit of this is that, if you're trying to access a character, you will get the full character you expect, even if it spans multiple bytes.

According to this blog post, Swift seems to handle grapheme clusters correctly. NC will follow similar logic to how Swift handles grapheme, or use a Unicode library like ICU. There's also this talk which is a good resource on the difference between Unicode graphemes, scalars, and UTF-8 units, and generally what it means for something to be a 'character'.

The definition of a 'character' in Unicode isn't quite aligned with what a character means to a person. For instance, the character ö looks like one character to us, but it actually consists of two code points, ¨and o. NC will count it as one character, not two, since a char represents what a person would say is a character.

Internally, NC will use UTF-8 encoding, as it is the most widely used everywhere else, making it a good default. If you'd like to use a different encoding, you can implement that yourself by converting your string into a byte array and parsing the raw bytes manually, or using a library that does that for you.