# Counting special characters ü, å, ø, etc

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/counting-special-characters-u-a-o-etc/78858
**Category:** General Usage
**Tags:** strings, unicode
**Created:** [April 1, 2022, 9:49am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/counting-special-characters-u-a-o-etc/78858 "2022-04-01T09:49:13Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 11

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![stevengj](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/stevengj/32/71_2.png) [@stevengj](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/stevengj)
#### Post date: [April 1, 2022, 12:39pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/counting-special-characters-u-a-o-etc/78858/11 "2022-04-01T12:39:49Z")

</div>

> [@etas](#):
>
> Hi, I have some strings with a name and a distance such as `"Haugastøl, Km 0"` . I want to remove the km point with the chop() function but what’s interesting is that chop() and length() count ø as one character but not findlast().

Separate from the issue of UTF-8 _indexing_ (as in `findlast`) vs “character counting” (as in `length`), you should also be aware that Unicode is more complicated than you think. For example:

```julia
julia> length("fübâr")
7

julia> collect("fübâr")
7-element Vector{Char}:
 'f': ASCII/Unicode U+0066 (category Ll: Letter, lowercase)
 'u': ASCII/Unicode U+0075 (category Ll: Letter, lowercase)
 '̈': Unicode U+0308 (category Mn: Mark, nonspacing)
 'b': ASCII/Unicode U+0062 (category Ll: Letter, lowercase)
 'a': ASCII/Unicode U+0061 (category Ll: Letter, lowercase)
 '̂': Unicode U+0302 (category Mn: Mark, nonspacing)
 'r': ASCII/Unicode U+0072 (category Ll: Letter, lowercase)

```

This has nothing to do with Julia or how it encodes strings. It’s because a “character” like `ü` might actually be represented by multiple Unicode codepoints (a `u` followed by a “combining accent” in this case).

See also my answer in a previous thread: [Substring function? - #31 by stevengj](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/substring-function/76675/31)

In practice, you mostly find indices in strings by searching, e.g. by doing a regex search for `r", *Km *[0-9]+$"` in this case, in which case these complications are mostly hidden.

But it can be confusing when slicing strings “visually” for things you enter by hand. For working “visually” with a string, the closest thing to a human-perceived “character” is actually something called a “grapheme” in Unicode, and Julia 1.9 should have a [function to slice strings based on grapheme counts](https://github.com/JuliaLang/julia/pull/44266).

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/counting-special-characters-u-a-o-etc/78858)._