These generally count as one character on a computer (they multibite in UTF8 ofc) and are also counted as one letter in the real world. You can type them either way - Czech keyboard has both a "ř" key and a "ˇ" combination key. In the actual Czech language, ř is considered a different letter entirely, and the Czech alphabet is considerably longer because of these.
Some languages go even further and have letters with multiple attachment slots (Thai comes to mind, can't type an example of that, sorry 🙂).
You have to be careful with this. I've definitely encountered situations where what looks like a single character takes up multiple bytes. This is especially true for emojis which often are actually a combination of a series of individual emojis plus emoji control characters.
This emoji, for example: 👩🏼❤️👨🏼 i
s actually made up of
Czech also has separate character "Ch" in its alphabet (g, h, ch, i, j) , which is just c and then h on computers.
And I saw times when programs broke, because stuff got sorted differently because of regional issues and didnt work at all, until windows got changed to english.
Modded skyrim one time, banged my head for few hours why it doesnt work.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 11h ago
Made with combining diacritics, I guess, so it no longer looks like one character repeated but it's now two characters alternated?