Get grapheme character count in javascript strings?

Question

I'm trying to get the length of a javascript string in user-visible graphemes, ie ignoring combining characters (and surrogate pairs?). Is this possible, and if so, how would I go about it?

We're using the dojo toolkit on our project, but any general javascript solution would be great.

Answer 1

Here is a pure JavaScript library that does just that:

https://github.com/orling/grapheme-splitter

It implements the Unicode UAX-29 standard in all its edge cases that you're likely to miss in a home-brew solution, like non-Latin diacritics, Hangul (Korean) jamo characters, emoji, multiple combining marks, etc.

Answer 2

This open-source CoffeeScript implementation seems to work decently enough: https://github.com/devongovett/grapheme-breaker (if only it wasn't CS ?)

Answer 3

Split string to array

Then count

let arr = [..."???????"] // ["?", "?", "?", "?", "?", "?", "?"]
let len = arr.lenght

Credit to downGoat

Note that this solution won't work in some special cases, such as commented below were one smiley is composed by four: [..."???????"] -> ['?', '?', '?', '?', '?', '?', '?']

Though I posted it here for Google searches as for most cases it works, and it is much easier then all other alternatives.