ECMAScript 6 introduces some useful new features that make working with astral
Unicode symbols easier.
One thing that is still missing though (AFAIK) is an easy way to count the
number of symbols / code points in a given string. As you know, we can’t rely
on `String.prototype.length` here, as a string containing nothing but an astral
symbol has a length of `2` instead of `1`:
> var poo = '\u{1F4A9}'; // U+1F4A9 PILE OF POO
> poo.length
2
Of course it’s possible to write some code yourself to loop over all the code
units in the string, handle surrogate pairs, and increment a counter manually
for each full code point, but that’s a pain.
It would be useful to have a new property on `String.prototype` that would
return the number of Unicode symbols in the string. Something like `realLength`
(of course, it needs a better name, but you get the idea):
> poo.realLength
1
Another possible solution is to add something like
`String.prototype.codePoints` which would be an array of the numerical code
point values in the string. That way, getting the length is only a matter of
accessing the `length` property of the array:
> poo.codePoints
[ 0x1F4A9 ]
> poo.codePoints.length
1
Or perhaps this would be better suited as a method?
> poo.getCodePoints()
[ 0x1F4A9 ]
> poo.getCodePoints().length
1
Has anything like this been considered/discussed here yet?
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