Vim : getline and non ascii character - character-encoding

Question

I use a single function (that a create) to know if the character next to the current cursor position is a space
function Test_caractere_suivant_espace()
"Test si le caractère suivant est une espace"
let position = getcurpos()
let ligne = getline(position[1])
let car_suivant = ligne[position[2]]
if car_suivant == ' '
return 1
else
return 0
endfunction
It work well… but only with Ascii characters, not with not Ascii characters in UTF-8.
Of course, I could try the value of the two first bits of the current character, but is there anyway to have UTF-8 characters in the array returned by getline and not a list of one-byte values?
A pist of solution
DJMcMayhem suggest a solution using
let ligne = split(getline(position[1]), '\zs')
But there is still a problem to determine the next character.
Here is the new version of the function
function Test_caractere_suivant_espace()
"Test si le caractère suivant est une espace"
let position = getcurpos()
let ligne = split(getline(position[1]), '\zs')
let car_suivant = ligne[position[2]]
echom car_suivant
if car_suivant == ' '
return 1
else
return 0
endfunction
In this line
α α α α α α α α α α
If I call the function in the before last α, I get
Error detected while processing function LB_content[2]..Test_caractere_suivant_espace:
line 4:
E684: list index out of range: 25
E15: Invalid expression: ligne[position[2]]
line 5:
E121: Undefined variable: car_suivant
E15: Invalid expression: car_suivant
line 6:
E121: Undefined variable: car_suivant
E15: Invalid expression: car_suivant == ' '

Answer 1

Unfortunately, there's no way to do this that I am aware of. :h getline mentions nothing about encoding options, and from this vim mailing list I found, it seems like this problem has been around for a while with no fix.
However, I did figure out a hacky workaround. Instead of working with strings, you can work with a list of characters instead. Indexing into that will give you whole characters instead of individual bytes. Try this:
let ligne = split(getline(position[1]), '\zs')