Except almost everyone always means #2. No one asked for strings to be ruined in this way, and this kind of pedantry has caused untold frustration from developers who just want their strings to work properly.
If you must expose the underlying byte array do so via a sane access function that returns a typed array.
As for “string length in pixels”, that has absolutely nothing to do with the string itself as that’s determined in the UI layer that ingests the string.
If you must expose the underlying byte array do so via a sane access function that returns a typed array.
As for “string length in pixels”, that has absolutely nothing to do with the string itself as that’s determined in the UI layer that ingests the string.