There is mention of how len() is bytes, not “characters”. A further subtlety: a rune (codepoint) is still not necessarily a “character” in terms of what is displayed for users — that would be a “grapheme”.
A grapheme can be multiple codepoints, with modifiers, joiners, etc.
This is true in all languages, it’s a Unicode thing, not a Go thing. Shameless plug, here is a grapheme tokenizer for Go: https://github.com/clipperhouse/uax29/tree/master/graphemes
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