Richard Light wrote:
 
> The *semantics* of "the first character" might be a difficult one.
> However, if you are simply trying to count characters, surely all you
> have to do is to ignore any combining characters that occur within the
> string.

That rule wouldn't work very well for some languages.  For example, in
Thai (and I believe many other South-East Asian and Indic languages)
some vowels are represented by base characters and some vowels are
represented by combining characters.  For Thai, this rule would be a bit
like saying in English that we will count a, e and o but won't count i
or u.

James


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