%@LEN[emoji] is 1 but i want it to be 2 — is there something to do this?

[Claire_CJS]

How can I accurately measure the width of a string, if %@LEN[] returns 1 for double-wide characters?

I stumbled upon this “bug” when i noticed the code to wrap long lines on my bigecho.bat (echo but in double-height) was wrapping incorrectly.

Notice the dropped "O" in Others.

The more emoji I put into the line, the worse it got:

Eventually I realize, it was undercounting the emoji’s length, because it was counting it as one character, even though, at least visually, it’s length (width) is 2.

Is there some easy way around this?

 

[Charles Dye]

Which emoji?

@LEN is the length of a string, not its width. @LEN counts many emojis as "two characters", but that's a happy coincidence at best. You could even call it a bug, just such a well-established bug that fixing it would be disastrous.

 

[rconn]

@LEN is calling a Windows API to get the string length, and technically Windows is correct - that emoji is one character.

What you're looking for is a function that returns the display width, not the character width. TCC & TCMD have an internal function that does that, but it is not exposed as a variable function (nobody has ever requested it before).

You could post it in the Suggestions Forum, or ask one of the plugin authors to whip up something for you.

 

[Claire_CJS]

Guess I’ll post it in the suggestions forum.

It’s just not possible to accurately align things otherwise, if emoji / double-width chars are involved.