Re: [boost] [locale] Review results for Boost.Locale library

Subject: Re: [boost] [locale] Review results for Boost.Locale library
From: Vladimir Prus (vladimir_at_[hidden])
Date: 2011-05-01 03:32:32

Mathias Gaunard wrote:

> On 30/04/2011 18:45, Vladimir Prus wrote:
>> Mathias Gaunard wrote:
>>
>>> On 26/04/2011 11:17, Sebastian Redl wrote:
>>>
>>>> GCC has options to control both the source (-finput-charset) and the
>>>> execution character set (-fexec-charset). They both default to UTF-8.
>>>> However, MSVC is more complicated. It will try to auto-detect the source
>>>> character set, but while it can detect UTF-16, it will treat everything
>>>> else as the system narrow encoding (usually a Windows-xxxx codepage)
>>>> unless the file starts with a UTF-8-encoded BOM. The worse problem is
>>>> that, except for a very new, poorly documented, and probably
>>>> experimental pragma, there is *no way* to change MSVC's execution
>>>> character set away from the system narrow encoding.
>>>
>>> A long time ago, I asked Vladimir Prus to help me add an option to
>>> Boost.Build that would allow to automatically prepend the BOM to source
>>> files when using MSVC, but unfortunately he was never able to help me do
>>> this.
>>
>> Well, if you have a command that can prepend BOM to a file, you can
>> easily modify 'actions compile-c-c++' in msvc.jam to run that command.
> 
> It would be nice if I could only do this when the source files have been
> tagged as utf-8 or something like that.

Well, it would be trivial to implement syntax like:

    utf8cpp file : file.cpp ;
    exe whatever : whatever.cpp file ;

If that's what you're asking for. In fact, here's a complete example
that should almost work, in any Jamfile:

    import type ;
    type.register UTF8CPP : : CPP ;

    import generators ;
    generators.register-standard $(__name__).add-bom : CPP : UTF8CPP ;
 
    actions add-bom
    {
        add-bom $(>) -o $(<)
    }

    utf8cpp file : file.cpp ;
    exe whatever : whatever.cpp file ;

I say "almost" because somebody who is actually interested in all this should
write the 'add-bom' utility, test everything, and do various other boring
things, like sending a patch and/or checking in. 

I think the ball is now in your court.

- Volodya

-- 
Vladimir Prus
Mentor Graphics
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