[boost] Re: Any interest in adding unicode support to boost?

From: Andy Little (andy_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-10-23 06:08:59

"Andy Little" <andy_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
news:clbvg3$f4o$1_at_sea.gmane.org...
>
> "Erik Wien" <wien_at_[hidden]> wrote in message
> news:cl1tqh$qp$1_at_sea.gmane.org...
> > Hi. I am in the process of planning a library for handling unicode
strings
> > in C++, and would like to probe the interest in the boost community for
> > something like that. I read through the unicode dicussion that was up
back
> > in april, and from what I could gather there was some amount of
interest,
> > but no one felt comfortable taking on the task as of yet.

I forgot to say ... What ever scheme you come up with, this is an
essential C+ library and needs to be done by somebody, sometime soon. :-)

.......

As a potential user...

The other problem that immediately springs to my mind is , how do I compose
a unicode string in my C++ source code. I really dont want to be dealing
with some unicode_character<TheEncode>(0x78,99,'c',-1) ; style.
The unicode charts I have seen are mind boggling, when taken in the raw.

However I always want to know the (common) encoding(s) for a particular
character. For that I would , I guess, need a naming convention for common
characters eg the functionality of
http://www.unicode.org/charts/charindex.html

eg:  I would prefer to do (similar to HTML character entities):
// whatever... target unicode string
encoded_string str;

 // set of common characters in required encoding
typedef unicode_common_character_set<TheEncode>  uni_chars;

// eg "um" where u == 'micro' symbol etc.
uni_chars  my_str[]
 = {uni_chars::quot, uni_chars::micro, uni_chars::m, uni_chars::quot};

str = my_str;

As a user thats probably the bit I am most interested in rather than the
implementation details.

regards
Andy Little