It was just a tweak to emoji characters to mark them all as East Asian Full Width instead of Narrow or Ambiguous so that they displayed correctly when using a fixed width font in a terminal console. This probably only matters if you like to use emoji filenames (you mad person), but it felt like a wart so I reported it & had a short back and forth with the chair of the emoji-related subcommittee which resulted in a proposal which was eventually accepted by the committee into Unicode 9.0. The committee were great: took my tiny bug report seriously, wrote huge long treatises to justify the change & eventually voted it into the standard.
(This was pretty much my peak geek achievement of 2016 so far :) )
Holy crap I appreciate this change! I thought they'd never fix it because of compatibility. Thanks for the effort you put in.
It's not that I use emoji filenames, it's that I deal with real-world natural language text all the time, including at the console.
(In terms of compatibility, my text-justifying function is going to stop working correctly for the period of time between when gnome-terminal updates to Unicode 9 and when Python 3.x does. Still worth it.)
If they get their unicode data from the same, OS supplied source that supplies the wcwidth() function (or be using wcwidth() themselves) a libc update should fix both, I think.
They don't. Python's "unicodedata" module updates with the minor version of Python.
This is good, actually, because the meaning of a string operation should be consistent when run on the same version of Python.
(If only this applied to the "default encoding". The default encoding should be UTF-8, not whatever you get by asking the user's likely-misconfigured locale. As it is, you can't rely on the default encoding if you want your code to work consistently.)
Ideally yes. I'd have to confirm that this extends to Pizza and Koalas. We fixed that issue as much as we could, even going as far as generating our own unicode width tables extracted from unifont, but it wasn't possible to fix in general without support form the terminals. Now that the standard is fixed (hopefully), I don't see a reason why the terminals wouldn't update their tables.
It was just a tweak to emoji characters to mark them all as East Asian Full Width instead of Narrow or Ambiguous so that they displayed correctly when using a fixed width font in a terminal console. This probably only matters if you like to use emoji filenames (you mad person), but it felt like a wart so I reported it & had a short back and forth with the chair of the emoji-related subcommittee which resulted in a proposal which was eventually accepted by the committee into Unicode 9.0. The committee were great: took my tiny bug report seriously, wrote huge long treatises to justify the change & eventually voted it into the standard.
(This was pretty much my peak geek achievement of 2016 so far :) )