RE: [boost] RE: [program_options] Unicode support

From: Ferdinand Prantl (ferdinand.prantl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-04-06 13:17:21

Hi Volodya, 

> From: Vladimir Prus [mailto:ghost_at_[hidden]] 
> 
> > I would make program_options support an imbue() function 
> that allows a 
> > locale to be specified (otherwise use the default locale) 
> 
> Why bother? As I've indicated, internal processing will work 
> just fine with UTF-8, and no interface of the library will 
> expose a UTF-8 encoded string.

Yes - that's it. There can be a locale en_US.UTF-8, and then the application
must accept it. If it does not, it has conversion support, imbuable or not.
Application should not require the library to have a unified encoding of
char * on all environments; that's not STL style.

> imbue() is a good thing for specifying what encoding char** 
> input has, but it's orthogonal to the rest of the library -- 
> it's used only on interface boundary.

Yes, that's also my opinion.

> > This provides much more flexibility than just supporting UTF-8.
> > UTF-8 is a really impractical encoding for almost any 
> locale where the 
> > majority of text is not ASCII like and the user may well prefer to 
> > encode text is Shift-JIS or other encodings.
> 
> Again, in my case the user does not use UTF-8 string, so why 
> would he care how the strings are encoded internally?

Yes again, now it seems to me we try to persuade each other about the same
thing :-)

Ferda

> - Volodya