The String class represents a series of 0 or more characters. Internally, they are stored in UTF-8. They may use any characters, including the NULL (\0) character.
Returns the length of the string. In Act, this is the number of characters as an end user would see it: that is, combining diacriticals are considered the same character as the letter they combine with. The same concept applies to various other multibyte characters. The string is normalized according to Normalization Form C from the Unicode Consortium. This is the same algorithm used