# String indices : byte indexing feels wrong

**URL:** https://discourse.julialang.org/t/string-indices-byte-indexing-feels-wrong/107164
**Category:** New to Julia
**Tags:** strings, unicode
**Created:** [December 5, 2023, 12:22pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/string-indices-byte-indexing-feels-wrong/107164 "2023-12-05T12:22:26Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 11

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### Author: ![mbauman](https://sea2.discourse-cdn.com/julialang/user_avatar/discourse.julialang.org/mbauman/32/31082_2.png) [@mbauman](https://discourse.julialang.org/u/mbauman)
#### Post date: [December 5, 2023, 3:11pm UTC](https://discourse.julialang.org/t/string-indices-byte-indexing-feels-wrong/107164/11 "2023-12-05T15:11:18Z")

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> [@stevengj](#):
>
> You don’t need to operate on Unicode codepoints (“characters”) for such calculations, especially since codepoints probably aren’t what you think. For example, `"noël"` has 5 characters, and `"🏳️‍🌈"` has 4 characters!

It gets even worse: the noel you wrote has 5, but when I copy-paste it into this text field, the `"noël"` I see here has 4 characters! Looks like we get lucky and Discourse doesn’t apply any normalization (but looks like my browser’s text entry box does), so you can even copy-paste the two strings into Julia to see for yourself.

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