The internationalization working group is planning to support grapheme clusters through its text segmentation API - the strawman:
http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=globalization:text_segmentation

Note that Unicode Standard Annex #29 allows for tailored (language sensitive) grapheme clusters, which makes ECMA-402 a better fit than ECMA-262.

Norbert


On Oct 24, 2013, at 7:02 , Claude Pache <claude.pache at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hello,
> 
> You might know that the following ES expressions are broken:
> 
> 	text.charAt(0) // get the first character of the text
> 	text.length > 100 ? text.substring(0,100) + '...' : text // cut the text after 100 characters
> 
> The reason is *not* because ES works with UTF-16 code units instead of Unicode code points (it's just a red herring!), but
> because _graphemes_ (that is, what a human perceives as a "character") may span multiple code units and/or code points.
> For example, the letter "n̈" ("n" with diaeresis) is coded using two code points, namely 
> U+006E (LATIN SMALL LETTER N) and U+0308 (COMBINING DIAERESIS), and two UTF-16 code units, 
> and it should be avoided to cut a string between these two codes in order to keep the resulting text meaningful for humans.
> (Nota bene: I have carefully chosen a grapheme that exists in a current written language and does not exist 
> as precomposed Unicode character.)
> 
> The correct technical notion to use here, is the notion of "grapheme cluster", that is 
> a sequence of Unicode code points that represents a grapheme.
> See [UAX29] (Unicode Standard Annex #29: Unicode text segmentation), section 3, for more info.
> 
> Therefore, I propose the following basic operations to operate on grapheme clusters:
> 
> (1) String.prototype.graphemeAt(pos)
> 	
> This method is similar to `String.prototype.charAt()`, but it returns a grapheme cluster instead of a string 
> composed of a single UTF-16 code unit. More precisely, it returns the shortest substring of `this` 
> beginning at position `pos` (inclusively) and ending at position `pos2` (exclusively), where `pos2` is the 
> smallest position in `this` which is greater than `pos` and which is an (extended) grapheme cluster boundary,
> according to the specification in [UAX29], section 3.1.
> If `pos` is out of bounds, an empty string is returned.
> 
> (2) String.prototype.graphemes(start = 0)
> 
> This method returns an iterator, enumerating the graphemes of `this`, starting at position `start`. 
> Given the `String.prototype.graphemeAt` method as above,
> it could be approximatively expressed in ES6 as follows (ignoring edge cases):
> 
> 	String.prototype.graphemes = function*(pos = 0) {
> 		pos = Math.floor(pos)
> 		if (pos < 0 || Number.isNaN(pos))
> 			pos = 0
> 		while (pos < this.length) {
> 			let grapheme = this.graphemeAt(pos)
> 			pos += grapheme.length
> 			yield grapheme
> 		}
> 	}
> 
> So, the two examples of the beginning of my message could be correctly implemented as follows:
> 
> 	text.graphemeAt(0) // get the first grapheme of the text
> 
> 	// shorten a text to its first hundred graphemes
> 	var shortenText = ''
> 	let numGraphemes = 0
> 	for (let grapheme of text) {
> 		numGraphemes += 1
> 		if (numGraphemes > 100) {
> 			shortenText += '…'
> 			break
> 		}
> 		shortenText += grapheme
> 	}
> 
> As a side note, I ask whether the `String.prototype.symbolAt `/`String.prototype.at` as proposed in a recent thread, 
> and the `String.prototype[@@iterator]` as currently specified, are really what people need, 
> or if they would mistakenly use them with the intended meaning of `String.prototype.graphemeAt`
> and `String.prototype.graphemes` as discussed in the present message?
> 
> Thoughts?
> 
> Claude
> 
> [UAX29]: http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr29/ "Unicode Standard Annex #29: Unicode text segmentation."
> 
> _______________________________________________
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> https://mail.mozilla.org/listinfo/es-discuss

The internationalization working group is planning to support grapheme clusters through its text segmentation API - the strawman:
http://wiki.ecmascript.org/doku.php?id=globalization:text_segmentation

Note that Unicode Standard Annex #29 allows for tailored (language sensitive) grapheme clusters, which makes ECMA-402 a better fit than ECMA-262.