That's the function I wrote to get string in Unicode characters:
function nbUnicodeLength(string){
var stringIndex = 0;
var unicodeIndex = 0;
var length = string.length;
var second;
var first;
while (stringIndex < length) {
first = string.charCodeAt(stringIndex); // returns an integer between 0 and 65535 representing the UTF-16 code unit at the given index.
if (first >= 0xD800 && first <= 0xDBFF && string.length > stringIndex + 1) {
second = string.charCodeAt(stringIndex + 1);
if (second >= 0xDC00 && second <= 0xDFFF) {
stringIndex += 2;
} else {
stringIndex += 1;
}
} else {
stringIndex += 1;
}
unicodeIndex += 1;
}
return unicodeIndex;
}