Beginning Swift

String Fundamentals

Before we get into how to use strings, we will cover why they are the way they are. For developers coming from other languages, this is a very reasonable question to ask.

Character

We won't go into the details of Unicode, but there are several ways of viewing a piece of Unicode text in Swift. This is done by using different collections:

let string = "The ☀ and 🌙"
string.utf8.count // 19
string.utf16.count // 13
string.unicodeScalars.count // 12

Note

An element of UTF-8 is 1 byte, UTF-16 is 2 bytes, and a Unicode scalar is 4 bytes.

In addition to everyone reporting a different number of symbols in the string, you may have also noticed that they are all wrong. String itself, however, has the right answer:

string.count // 11

This is because ...