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 14:15:30

On Wed, Jan 19, 2011 at 7:54 PM, Alexander Lamaison <awl03_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>
>> 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.) Â 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.
>
> Hmmmm ... I'm starting to come round to your std::string == UTF-8 point-of
> view.
>
> The one thing that would still annoy me is that std::string's interface was
> clearly designed for single-byte == single-character/codepoint/whatever
> operation. Â I don't suppose anyone will be adding
> .begin_character()/.end_character() methods to std::string any time soon.

This is where the (Boost.)Locale and (Boost.)Unicode libraries could provide
insight into how to extend the std::string interface or be the testbed for
new additions to the standard library related to string manipulation.
(Provided, the standard adopts UTF-8 as a native encoding. Or does it already ?)

Matus