Re: [boost] Program Options library and Unicode compliance

Subject: Re: [boost] Program Options library and Unicode compliance
From: Gavin Lambert (gavinl_at_[hidden])
Date: 2013-09-30 01:46:37

On 9/25/2013 6:29 PM, Quoth munsingh:
> I noticed that the class option_description does not work with wstring,
> instead works with string.
>
> Does anyone has any idea why is it so?

I'm just guessing, but most likely because it grew from Unixy roots, and 
UCS-16/32 is rarer there.  (And because not everyone agrees on how wide 
a wchar_t is, while at least most implementations agree on char.)

Also probably because it's simpler to have the help text sent directly 
to std::cout rather than having to support two different 
option_description implementations or two separate description fields 
(what should it do if you populate both?).  And simpler if your 
translation code only has to worry about one path too.

Since you should be filling this in with text in the user's language 
anyway, it should be safe to convert whatever you have to the 8-bit 
locale before giving it to option_description.  (And the user should 
have set their 8-bit locale to UTF-8 or another multibyte encoding if 
their language cannot otherwise be expressed in an 8-bit character set.)