I would think beginner code golfers are rarely beginner programmers. Experienced programmer probably knows the basics of encodings and that some chars take multiple bytes.

Even if that's true, it's still useful that we show the exact number of bytes and characters above the editor. It can be useful for anyone who is making decisions about whether the cost is lower to have multiple instances of the same multi-byte character or if they should reduce duplication of the multi-byte characters or figure out another way to generate them.

If we only showed the byte count, it would be more difficult to count the number of bytes used for each character. For example, you could use tricks like deleting the characters one at a time until you see the byte count go down by more than one. Then you know the exact number of bytes of the character you just deleted. It's more convenient to show the byte and char counts, because it makes it more obvious when the two measures begin to diverge. It gives you a quick way to see whether you have at least one multi-byte character. Even though people may be generally aware of encodings, they may not realize specific characters used for input or output are multiple bytes.

Before we had both the byte and character counts, I had to use external tools like https://mothereff.in/byte-counter more frequently.

I would prefer to extend this even further, so that we show the number of bytes and characters in the selected text #524.

Uh oh!

Remove chars scoring altogether #618

Description

Activity

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

Labels

Type

Projects

Milestone

Relationships

Development

Issue actions