Warren Moore

hrmpf, the MacOS/iOS NSString class is UTF-16, and there I was hoping that Windows is the only platform with broken unicode support

You mean internally? Because it does accept in/out utf8 interfaces to set/grab the data

Yes, but also the API is 'sort-of' messed up UTF-16, e.g. length is returned as number of "code units" (number of unichars) and characterAtIndex() returns a single unichar, but unichar is uint16_t, so some characters return 2 code units. Same mess as on Windows.

I bet when they created NSString, they thought that a simple 16-bit-per-character encoding ought-to-be-enough-for-everybody, and later they hacked this into UTF-16. I would've preferred ASCII hacked into UTF-8 instead ;)

...what I'd need is a simple way to loop over UTF-32 characters in the NSString, I'm aware that I can decode into an NSData object with any encoding, but that's a bit awkward :D

You can read more about the history of NSString here: https://www.objc.io/issues/9-strings/unicode/ …, but generally speaking, a list of code points (≠ characters) isn’t what you want, regardless of encoding. Unless you’re writing your own shaping/layout engine, which is a Very Hard Problem.

Well, he's doing UI so very likely he actually wants code units