# Using Unicode Characters in Fortran

**URL:** <https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/using-unicode-characters-in-fortran/2764>\
**Category:** Tutorials\
**Created:** [February 10, 2022, 7:19pm UTC](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/using-unicode-characters-in-fortran/2764 "2022-02-10T19:19:38Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 1\
**Showing post:** 14

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**Author:** ![plevold](https://yyz2.discourse-cdn.com/free1/user_avatar/fortran-lang.discourse.group/plevold/32/754_2.png) [@plevold](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/u/plevold)\
**Post date:** [February 11, 2022, 11:55am UTC](https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/using-unicode-characters-in-fortran/2764/14 "2022-02-11T11:55:26Z")

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The problem is that, at least as far as I understand, a “character” is a very vague term and not precisely defined in Unicode. I’ll highly reccoment the [Characters](http://utf8everywhere.org/#characters) section of the UTF-8 Everywhere Manifesto. Some relevant quotes:

> (…)
> 
> - User-perceived character — Whatever the end user thinks of as a character. This notion is language dependent. For instance, ‘ch’ is two letters in English and Latin, but considered to be one letter in Czech and Slovak.
> - Grapheme cluster — A sequence of coded characters that ‘should be kept together’.[§2.11] Grapheme clusters approximate the notion of user-perceived characters in a language independent way. They are used for, e.g., cursor movement and selection.  
> (…)

> ‘Character’ may refer to any of the above. The Unicode Standard uses it as a synonym for coded character.[§3.4] When a programming language or a library documentation says ‘character’, it typically means a code unit. When an end user is asked about the number of characters in a string, he will count the user-perceived characters. A programmer might count characters as code units, code points, or grapheme clusters, according to the level of the programmer’s Unicode expertise. For example, [this is how Twitter counts characters](https://developer.twitter.com/en/docs/basics/counting-characters.html). **In our opinion, a string length function should not necessarily return one for the string ‘🐨’ to be considered Unicode-compliant.**

(Emphasis on the last sentence added by me)

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