Re: [boost] Unicode and filesystem

From: Stefan Seefeld (seefeld_at_[hidden])
Date: 2003-09-14 19:27:38

Adrian Michel wrote:
>>wchar * != unicode.
>>
>>Just using wchar_t is by far not enough to expect unicode support.
>>You generally need to know what encoding a string is in. In particular,
>>some encodings such as utf-8 don't even have a fixed-width representation.

[...]

> I did not mention that I was referring to Unicode on Windows, which uses 16
> bits characters.

ok, so this looks like utf-16, then. But utf-16 is not unicode.
(see http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16)

> There is support for data streams of Unicode characters. For example, in
> boost/filesystem/fstream.hpp:

I reiterate, having a function that takes 'wchar_t' arguments doesn't tell
you much about the kind of unicode support. Yes, it *may* be utf-16, but
'supports unicode' means a *lot* more than that. Neither can you deduce from
'wchar_t' the kind of encoding actually used, nor is an interface that understands
utf-16 automatically 'unicode aware'.

Regards,
                Stefan