Swift Characters

Swift Characters

Character is one user-visible character.

Strings are collections of characters.

Characters and String Length

Use Character for single letters.

Use String.count to get the number of characters.

let ch: Character = "A"
print(ch)
let word = "Swift"
print(word.count)

This prints a character and a string length.

Characters and String Conversion

Convert between Character and String as needed.

let ch: Character = "A"
let s = String(ch)
print(s)              // "A"

Unicode and Grapheme Clusters

Some characters use multiple Unicode scalars but still count as one character.

let heart: Character = "❤️"
print(heart)
let flag: Character = "🇳🇴" // composed of two regional indicators
print(flag)
print("e\u{301}".count) // 1 (e + combining acute accent)