bug#36923: Combining Diacritical Marks are not Latin only

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Juri Linkov <juri@linkov.net>
> Cc: 36923@debbugs.gnu.org
> Date: Mon, 05 Aug 2019 22:41:59 +0300
> 
> >>   (aref char-script-table ?\N{COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT})
> >>
> >> could return
> >>
> >>   (latin greek cyrillic)
> >>
> >> instead of the current
> >>
> >>   latin
> >
> > char-script-table is documented to yield a single symbol, so returning
> > a list would be an incompatible change, which we should avoid.
> 
> The docstring of char-script-table says:
> 
>   Char table of script symbols.
>   It has one extra slot whose value is a list of script symbols.
> 
> So it seems char-script-table should yield a list of script symbols?

No, that's only in the extra slot.  The ELisp manual says:

 -- Variable: char-script-table
     The value of this variable is a char-table that specifies, for each
     character, a symbol whose name is the script to which the character
     belongs, according to the Unicode Standard classification of the
     Unicode code space into script-specific blocks.  This char-table
     has a single extra slot whose value is the list of all script
     symbols.

> I searched more for char-script-table in the documentation, and one
> place where it's used is forward-word.  But I don't understand why
> forward-word doesn't stop between “COMBINING ACUTE ACCENT” (that is
> the Latin script) and non-Latin letters.

See word-combining-categories: it causes word-movement commands to
ignore any script boundaries with characters whose category is
combining diacritic or mark.

> Maybe it doesn't stop because of special script handling in
> ‘find-word-boundary-function-table’?

Not by default, because find-word-boundary-function-table's entry for
any character is nil by default.

> BTW, while looking at forward-word and right-word I noticed inconsistency:
> there are left-word and right-word commands, but no left-sexp and right-sexp
> to accompany forward-sexp.

Programming languages are all L2R, so there's no need to move by sexps
in R2L direction.

> > More generally, I think what you describe is a clear conceptual bug in
> > markchars-mode: it should only pay attention to the script of the base
> > characters, not to the script of combining accents.  The latter is
> > mostly irrelevant, certainly so for the purpose of detecting
> > confusables.
> 
> Could you suggest a proper function to strip all combining characters
> from the string?

Each base character has its canonical combining class attribute as
zero, so you could use

   (get-char-code-property CHAR 'canonical-combining-class)

to filter out those CHARs for which the value is non-zero.

Alternatively, you could go by categories: base characters have the
?. category set, combining characters have the ?^ category set.

My recommendation is to use the canonical-combining-class property, as
it is a more direct way of doing this.