Re: [boost] [general] What will string handling in C++ look like in the future [was Always treat ... ]

Subject: Re: [boost] [general] What will string handling in C++ look like in the future [was Always treat ... ]
From: Matus Chochlik (chochlik_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-01-19 12:41:22

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 6:21 PM, Alexander Lamaison <awl03_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>> On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 18:10:06 +0100, Matus Chochlik wrote:
>>
>> >>
>> > They made the transition? Â I must have missed this.
>> >
>> > The Windows API _is_ C and has all the problems we've been talking about.
>> >
>> OK, besides Microsoft C world :)
>
> By changing the OS-default encoding to assume char* string was UTF-8. Â Same
> as for C++. Â This whole issue is about how to accommodate OSses that don't
> make that assumption.

Agreed, again if Microsoft could move by default to UTF-8
for the various locales instead of using the current encodings
then this whole discussion would be moot.

For the time being we would need to do something like this
even if a complete transcoding is not possible:

std::string filepath(get_path_in_utf8())
std::fstream file(utf8_to_locale_encoding(filepath));

everywhere the implementation (STL, etc.)  expects native
encoding. This is the ugliest part of the whole transition.
Boost could hide this completely by using the wide-char
interfaces and doing CreateFileW(utf8_to_winapi_wide(filepath), ...).

It also could be an opportunity for alternate
implementations of STL which would handle it transparently.

Matus