[boost] Re: [Unicode strings] We're off

From: Erik Wien (wien_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-03-20 20:00:58

Daniel James wrote:
> Why should such a string class stop at unicode? Wouldn't it be a good
> idea to support other encodings? It might be better to have such a class
> as part of a separate library, probably with 'pluggable' encodings,
> which would include unicode.

That was the idea behind the "character_set_traits" class in the current 
prototype. You could just implement the tratis for some other encoding, 
and you'd be set. The problem though (and in my opinion it's a big one), 
is that for the encoded_string class (and any iostream implementation 
based on the same concepts) to be useable at all as a Unicode string 
class, we would have to include a lot of functionality that is Unicode 
specific. (Normalization is one example) What would we do with this 
functionality for Shift-JIS?