Applescript character count in words with combining diacritics If I combine an acute accent with, say "x", with a w before it and a y following, like this: "wx̀y", this will look good in BBEdit and Word, and both programs will give a character count of 4. However, this applescript:

set a to "wx̀y"

display dialog (number of characters of a)

... will reply "3".

This is in Smile and Script Debugger, my Script Editor goes into beach ball mode seconds after opening. And it is a real problem in indexing some exotic texts, not only one out of curiosity, so any suggestions would be most welcome.
I did a bit of experimentation, and I get varied results. Fortunately, one of those results was 4. I did this by outsourcing the calculation to Python:

on run {input, parameters}
    set var to "wx̀y"

    set output to (do shell script ¬
"python - &lt;&lt;EOF
# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
print len(u'" &amp; var &amp; "')
EOF")

    return output
end run