5)"ix,"123a56789")
RegexMatch("3a5", first="3", second="5")
julia> m1.offsets
2-element Array{Int64,1}:
3
5
julia> m1[:first]
"3"
julia> m1[:second]
"5"
```
Regards
Johann
---
### Author:  [@nalimilan](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/nalimilan)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 7:48am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/regular-expressions-returning-offsets-in-bytes-not-characters/4676/5 "2017-07-06T07:48:00Z")
You don’t need to use `UTF32String` nor LegacyStrings. Maybe you can tell us more about what you want to do?
String indices are in bytes in Julia (at least for the default `String` type) because that’s the only efficient way of accessing a character in variable length encodings like UTF-8 or UTF-16. Counting characters requires iterating over the string from its beginning.
If what you really need is the number of characters before the first match, you can just do something like `length(s[1:m1.offsets[1]])` or (a bit more efficient) `length(SubString(s, 1, m1.offsets[1]))`. But beware that “character” is a subtle notion, which does not necessarily correspond to Unicode codepoints. See `graphemes` if what you need is the user-perceived number of characters.
---
### Author:  [@waldyrious](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/waldyrious)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 9:30am UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/regular-expressions-returning-offsets-in-bytes-not-characters/4676/6 "2017-07-06T09:30:25Z")
> [@nalimilan](#):
>
> See `graphemes` if what you need is the user-perceived number of characters.
Docs link for convenience: [https://docs.julialang.org/en/stable/stdlib/strings/#Base.UTF8proc.graphemes](https://docs.julialang.org/en/stable/stdlib/strings/#Base.UTF8proc.graphemes)
---
### Author:  [@stevengj](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/stevengj)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 12:37pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/regular-expressions-returning-offsets-in-bytes-not-characters/4676/7 "2017-07-06T12:37:37Z")
> [@cstook](#):
>
> Regular expressions seems to be returning offsets in bytes not characters. Is this the intended behavior? Is there a way to get the offsets in characters?
You can get the offset in characters from the `ind2chr` function.
The reason that they return the offsets in bytes (“code units” of the underlying UTF-8 encoding) is this is how Julia `String` is indexed, so byte offsets are usually the most useful thing to know (e.g. to extract substrings from the original string).
```julia
julia> s = "123α56789"
"123α56789"
julia> m2 = match(r"(3).*(5)"ix, s)
RegexMatch("3α5", 1="3", 2="5")
julia> m2.offsets
2-element Array{Int64,1}:
3
6
julia> s[m2.offsets]
"35"
julia> ind2chr.(s, m2.offsets)
2-element Array{Int64,1}:
3
5
```
---
### Author:  [@stevengj](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/stevengj)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 12:41pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/regular-expressions-returning-offsets-in-bytes-not-characters/4676/8 "2017-07-06T12:41:37Z")
> [@nalimilan](#):
>
> `length(s[1:m1.offsets[1]])` or (a bit more efficient) `length(SubString(s, 1, m1.offsets[1]))`
Don’t do this. Use `ind2chr`.
But you’re right that you may want to use `graphemes`, e.g. `length(graphemes(SubString(s, 1, m2.offsets[2])))`, if you want to count user-perceived characters.
---
### Author:  [@cstook](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/cstook)
#### Post date: [July 6, 2017, 10:27pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/regular-expressions-returning-offsets-in-bytes-not-characters/4676/9 "2017-07-06T22:27:14Z")
I was using a mixture of `length` and `match.offsets` to compute indices into strings. This was very bad. Switching to using only `match.offsets` fixed the problem.
Thank everyone for your help.
---
### Author:  [@stevengj](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/stevengj)
#### Post date: [July 7, 2017, 1:19pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/regular-expressions-returning-offsets-in-bytes-not-characters/4676/10 "2017-07-07T13:19:47Z")
> [@cstook](#):
>
> I was using a mixture of `length` and `match.offsets` to compute indices into strings.
Never use `length(s)` for indexing strings; use `endof(s)` instead.