Skip to content

Unicode characters #4

Description

@mame

Currently, error_highlight does not handle Unicode characters well. There are two subissues.

  1. Ruby::AST::Node#first_column and #last_column seem to return the column in bytes, but String#match handles the index in characters. We need to convert the column indexes.
  2. Some Unicode characters are displayed as two (or more?) columns in a terminal with monospace font.

(1) is relatively simple, but (2) is a bit tough. It requires a table telling how many columns each character has. It is known that Reline has such a table. But because error_highlight is a built-in gem that is loaded at Ruby process invocation, it is not good for error_highlight to depend on Reline (unless we make Reline a special built-in gem). We need to discuss how we make the table available to error_highlight.

Activity

  1. kddnewton commented on Sep 15, 2021

    @kddnewton
    Contributor

    Hey @mame!

    I hit this same thing with ripper when I was writing prettier. I ended up solving it by taking the source, splitting it up into multiples lines, and converting each into an object that responded to #[] so that I could get the right indices.

    Here are some links to the source:

    I hope it's helpful!

  2. mame commented on Sep 15, 2021

    @mame
    MemberAuthor

    Thanks for the information. I think it is about the issue (1) that I said. Yeah, it is solvable by converting the indices.

    The tougher issue is (2). Unfortunately, some Unicode characters (mainly Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters) are rendered as if they have two columns.

    image

    あ is one Japanese letter that takes two columns in the terminal. To highlight the letter, we need to put two ^s under the line. To implement this, error_highlight needs a table to tell what character takes two (or more) columns.

    Just FYI: To make matters worse, the column count may change depending on a font and a terminal. This issue is called East Asian Width:

    Ambiguous width characters are all those characters that can occur as fullwidth characters in any of a number of East Asian legacy character encodings. They have a “resolved” width of either narrow or wide depending on the context of their use.

    To be honest, I don't want to face this problem for now 😇

  3. kddnewton commented on Sep 15, 2021

    @kddnewton
    Contributor

    @mame I see, I think I understand the problem better now. In that case it would probably be nice to have Ruby::AST::Node have methods like {first,last}_character_column or something similar.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Type

    No type

    Projects

    No projects

      Milestone

      No milestone

      Relationships

      None yet

      Development

      No branches or pull requests

      Issue actions