Re: [boost] string classes (Was: GUI)

From: Vladimir Prus (ghost_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-09-19 03:12:59

Reece Dunn wrote:

> Vladimir Prus wrote:
>> Adam Badura wrote:
>> 
>>>    I looked on a few GUI C++ libraries, but none of them satisfied me.
>>>    Most
>>>commonly of this reasons:
>>>1) weak support if at all for exceptions (wxWidgets for example)
>>>2) using own classes instead of standard (most common for string)
>>>(wxWidgets and MFC for example)
>> 
>> Well, given that std::basic_string's support for Unicode is lacking, I
>> would consider using custom string class an advantage of those libraries.
>> Hey, you can't even convert std::string to std::wstring, and you can't
>> construct std::wstring from char*. Can you convert std::wstring to any of
>> Unicode's normalization forms? How portable is reading of std::wstring
>> from a file with specific 8-bit encoding?
> 
> WRT the MFC/ATL/WTL libraries, they use the Win32 API calls
> WideCharToMultiByte (WC2MB) and MultiByteToWideChar (MB2WC) to do the
> conversion using the current thread's codepage. Likewise, their
> CA2W/CW2A helper classes do a similar thing.
> 
> The WC2MB/MB2WC API allow you to pass in a specific codepage (not just
> the current thread/user's). Some of these include:
>    UTF7 = 65000
>    UTF8 = 65001
>    UTF16 (Little Endian) = 1200
>    UTF16 (Big Endian) = 1200
> 
> So, you could say something like:
> 
> std::cout << unicode_cast< std::string >( russian_text, unicode::utf8 );

Sure, but there's no "std::" in front of "unicode_cast". In fact, I don't
know what the "unicode_cast" comes from. My points is not that you cannot
implement all the missing functionality for std::string. The point is that
std:: namespace does not have this functionality. 

> I am not sure about how this would work for Linux, Mac and other
> operating systems, though.

Assuming unicode_cast is from MFC/ATL/WTL -- then well, none for Linux.

- Volodya