Medium uses UTF-16 character offsets (likely to make it easier to parse
in JavaScript) but Crystal uses UTF-8. Converting strings to UTF-16 to
do offset calculation then back to UFT-8 fixes some markup bugs.
---
Medium calculates markup offsets using UTF-16 encoding. Some characters
like Emoji are count as multiple bytes which affects those offsets. For
example in UTF-16 💸 is worth two bytes, but Crystal strings only count
it as one. This is a problem for markup generation because it can
offset the markup and even cause out-of-range errors.
Take the following example:
💸💸!
Imagine that `!` was bold but the emoji isn't. For Crystal, this starts
at char index 2, end at char index 3. Medium's markup will say markup
goes from character 4 to 5. In a 3 character string like this, trying
to access character range 4...5 is an error because 5 is already out of
bounds.
My theory is that this is meant to be compatible with JavaScript's
string length calculations, as Medium is primarily a platform built for
the web:
```js
"a".length // 1
"💸".length // 2
"👩❤️💋👩".length // 11
```
To get these same numbers in Crystal strings must be converted to
UTF-16:
```crystal
"a".to_utf16.size # 1
"💸".to_utf16.size # 2
"👩❤️💋👩".to_utf16.size # 11
```
The MarkupConverter now converts text into UFT-16 byte arrays on
initialization. Once it's figured out the range of bytes needed for
each piece of markup, it converts it back into UTF-8 strings.
