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Has anyone ever created a robust Unicode string API that treats graphemes as indivisible units? I keep seeing libraries that force you to directly handle codepoints, making it your problem to be aware of which characters are combining and have to be kept together (which almost nobody has done their homework on) so as not to corrupt the text.

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Would Perl's Unicode::Normalize module fit your bill? I believe Unicode::Collate uses it so that a single codepoint accented 'e', for example, sorts the same as 'e' with a combining accent.

That's similar. What I'd really like to see is a string API that doesn't let you separate the letter and the combining accent at all, whether it has a precomposed normalization or not (unless you dig all the way down to asking which codepoints a grapheme is composed from).

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