Re: [boost] Strings tagged with their character set

From: James Porter (porterj_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-09-27 10:23:19

I'd argue that that's more of a typesetting issue, since the actual code 
points are fixed-width. That said, someone mentioned the Windows API's 
use of UTF-16, which is one place where you wouldn't be using I/O 
streams to convert to a variable-width encoding.

For certain special purposes (like the one above), a variable-width 
string class would be useful, but I think we should focus on storing 
strings in fixed-width encodings and then converting them appropriately 
during I/O. This stays closer to the "namespace std" way, and should 
solve most (but obviously not all) of the problems with character encodings.

- James

Sebastian Redl wrote:
> UTF-32 is a fixed-width encoding of Unicode, but Unicode itself is a
> "variable-width character set", what with combining characters.
> 
> Whether this is the business of a core string layer in C++ is a
> different question.
> 
> Sebastian Redl
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