Strings in Swift 2
In Swift 2, the
Stringtype no longer conforms to theCollectionTypeprotocol, whereStringwas previously a collection ofCharactervalues, similar to an array. Now,Stringprovides acharactersproperty that exposes a character collection view.[…]
When you add an element to a collection, you expect that the collection will contain that element. That is, when you append a value to an array, the array then contains that value. The same applies to a dictionary or a set. However, when you append a combining mark character to a string, the contents of the string itself change.
[…]
However,
Stringdetermines equality based on being canonically equivalent. Characters are canonically equivalent if they have the same linguistic meaning and appearance, even if they are composed from different Unicode scalars behind the scenes. […] In Swift, strings are considered equal regardless of whether they are constructed from decomposed or precomposed character sequences.
Update (2015-07-25): Pierre Lebeaupin:
If Apple can’t get its “Characters”, UTF-16 scalars, and bytes of a seemingly simple string such as “café” straight in a blog post designed to show these very views of that string, what hope could you possibly have of getting “character”-wise text processing right?
Indeed, Apple has corrected its blog post (silently).
Baking in a canonicalization policy into a basic type is … interesting. I’m sure somewhere someone will be unhappy their password no longer hashes to the same value.
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According to the HTTP headers of the new table image:
Last-Modified: Fri, 24 Jul 2015 21:03:44 GMT
They fixed it before my post was published (but not before I was able to download a copy of the old one as proof); I did not realize it until this morning. So it seems they did not change it in reaction to my post, but instead from another tip-off.
[…] that in practice is currently too much of a pain to use. Likewise, the standard library is still in flux and not fully understood, whereas Foundation is stable and a known quantity. Foundation is great. […]
