Re: [boost] UTF8 strings

From: Beman Dawes (bdawes_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-07-30 07:25:26

At 03:35 AM 7/30/2003, Christophe Meessen wrote:

 >would anybody be interested in a stdC++ string variant class using UTF8
 >as native encoding ?

Yes, although I'd be much more interested in a string variant that could 
handle other multi-byte encodings too. That would be very useful, IMO.

Some applications would seem to need compile-time choice of encoding for 
efficiency which others would need run-time choice for flexibility. If it 
was demonstrated that the cost of run-time polymorphism was low (say 2-4 
percent) it might be OK to just supply run-time polymorphism.

Conversions between character encodings is also of interest.

Dinkumware has a commercial library which does conversions, based on the 
standard's codecvt mechanism, IIUC. I mention it because it wouldn't be a 
huge surprise if they eventually propose their interface for 
standardization. Conversions between encodings are notoriously messy, and 
there are few people who understand all the issues.

--Beman