Re: [Boost-users] std::string to std::wstring

From: Tobias Schwinger (tschwinger_at_[hidden])
Date: 2007-01-28 04:25:26

John Christopher wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> The reason I asked is that while I have been using
>>>          std::string  a;
>>>          std::wstring b( a.begin(),a.end());
>>>          std::string  c(b.begin(),b.end());
> for a while now, I have started wondering if I was not shooting myself in 
> the foot without knowing... I am no Unicode expert and Boost facilities in 
> that area would certainly give me some confidence. Boost is nice also 
> because codes are visited by skilled and experienced programmers and I am 
> glad to benefit from that... :) More generally, I am still struggling on 
> which string class I should use: std::string, std::wstring, some custom 
> class...  

Not claiming to be a expert in this field, I

     typedef std::wstring string;

for my project if I need Unicode. I expect the iterators of some Unicode 
string class to (at least) give me wide characters, regardless of the 
underlying in-memory encoding. The 'typedef' (placed in some global 
header) allows me to easily change the string class, if I have to (e.g. 
for saving memory or bandwidth).
std::string is basically just a container for bytes, that is length() 
will start lying as soon as there are characters that are represented by 
more than one byte (like with UTF-8).

Regards,
Tobias