How to resolve the algorithm String length step by step in the Ruby programming language

Published on 12 May 2024 09:40 PM

How to resolve the algorithm String length step by step in the Ruby programming language

Table of Contents

Problem Statement

Find the character and byte length of a string. This means encodings like UTF-8 need to be handled properly, as there is not necessarily a one-to-one relationship between bytes and characters. By character, we mean an individual Unicode code point, not a user-visible grapheme containing combining characters. For example, the character length of "møøse" is 5 but the byte length is 7 in UTF-8 and 10 in UTF-16. Non-BMP code points (those between 0x10000 and 0x10FFFF) must also be handled correctly: answers should produce actual character counts in code points, not in code unit counts. Therefore a string like "𝔘𝔫𝔦𝔠𝔬𝔡𝔢" (consisting of the 7 Unicode characters U+1D518 U+1D52B U+1D526 U+1D520 U+1D52C U+1D521 U+1D522) is 7 characters long, not 14 UTF-16 code units; and it is 28 bytes long whether encoded in UTF-8 or in UTF-16.
Please mark your examples with ===Character Length=== or ===Byte Length===. If your language is capable of providing the string length in graphemes, mark those examples with ===Grapheme Length===.
For example, the string "J̲o̲s̲é̲" ("J\x{332}o\x{332}s\x{332}e\x{301}\x{332}") has 4 user-visible graphemes, 9 characters (code points), and 14 bytes when encoded in UTF-8.

Let's start with the solution:

Step by Step solution about How to resolve the algorithm String length step by step in the Ruby programming language

The provided code is a Ruby script that demonstrates the different ways to count the length of a string in Ruby. It defines the bytesize method for Ruby 1.8.6, which is an alias for the length method, and then uses it to count the number of bytes in a string. It also uses the chars.length method to count the number of characters in a string, and the grapheme_clusters.length method to count the number of grapheme clusters (which are the smallest units of text that are meaningful to a user).

The script also includes a string with Japanese characters, and demonstrates how the gsub(/./u, ' ') method can be used to replace each character with a space, which can be useful for counting the number of characters in a string that contains multibyte characters.

Here is a detailed explanation of the code:

  • The first line of the code defines a string named "J̲o̲s̲é̲".
  • The second line of the code uses the bytesize method to count the number of bytes in the string. The result is 9.
  • The third line of the code uses the chars.length method to count the number of characters in the string. The result is 4.
  • The fourth line of the code uses the grapheme_clusters.length method to count the number of grapheme clusters in the string. The result is 1.
  • The fifth line of the code is a comment that describes the coding used for the string.
  • The sixth line of the code is a class definition for the String class.
  • The seventh line of the code uses the unless keyword to check if the bytesize method is defined for the String class.
  • The eighth line of the code defines the bytesize method as an alias for the length method.
  • The ninth line of the code ends the class definition.
  • The tenth line of the code defines a string named s that contains Japanese characters.
  • The eleventh line of the code uses the puts method to print the byte length of the string s. The result is 12.
  • The twelfth line of the code uses the puts method to print the character length of the string s. The result is 6.

Source code in the ruby programming language

"J̲o̲s̲é̲".bytesize

"J̲o̲s̲é̲".chars.length

"J̲o̲s̲é̲".grapheme_clusters.length

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

class String
  # Define String#bytesize for Ruby 1.8.6.
  unless method_defined?(:bytesize)
    alias bytesize length
  end
end

s = "文字化け"
puts "Byte length: %d" % s.bytesize
puts "Character length: %d" % s.gsub(/./u, ' ').size

  

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