Re: [boost] Proposal: XML APIs in boost

From: Anthony Williams (anthony_w.geo_at_[hidden])
Date: 2005-11-01 12:02:06

"Gennadiy Rozental" <gennadiy.rozental_at_[hidden]> writes:

> "Stefan Seefeld" <seefeld_at_[hidden]> wrote in message 
> news:43678835.2010605_at_sympatico.ca...
>> David Abrahams wrote:
>>
>>> IIUC the major obstacle to XML support is proper unicode support.
>>> Don't we need a unicode library first?
>>
>> I carefully worked around this issue by making the string type
>> a template parameter. :-)
>>
>> That's not only because boost doesn't have a unicode library yet,
>> but because people might use different libraries for that, or
>> even use std::string if they are careful.
>
> IMO, Unicode support is way beyond string template parameter. Unicode means 
> different character sets to support, different encoding format, different 
> encoding schemes sets and different tradeoffs in optimization and all above.

Sort of. For XML processing, the primary feature of Unicode is the extended
character set. For XML 1.0, once an XML processor has decided whether or not a
given character is whitespace, one of the special characters (such as <, >,
and &), a name start character, a name character or "other", the peculiarities
of Unicode are mostly irrelevant. Obviously, there has to be code to handle
the detection of the input encoding, and conversion to a stream of Unicode
codepoints, in order to facilitate such classification. However, beyond that,
the details don't matter.

It may be that for schema processing, or XPath processing, then you need more
Unicode facilities; I never got that far when writing my XML processor.

Anthony
-- 
Anthony Williams
Software Developer
Just Software Solutions Ltd
http://www.justsoftwaresolutions.co.uk