Better Unicode Support

handling Unicode strings in ES5 and its alternative in ES6: using the for-of loop and spread operator to process characters

ES5 handles string operations in two-byte chunks. As a result, handling Unicode strings with a mixture of two and four byte long codes often gets confusing. Characters of Unicode strings were often not printable on their own, and in general, any string operation required extra care.

We still calculate the length of a string by dividing the number of bytes allocated by a string by two. However, there are some updates in ES6 that make String handling more user-friendly.

  • codePointAt(n) returns the code of the character at the nth position regardless of whether it is a two byte or a four-byte long character. If n points at the second half of a four-byte Unicode character, only the code of the second half is returned

In ES6, it is possible to define four byte long Unicode characters with their code:

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