Re: [Boost-users] Filesystem, serialization, character encoding and portable software

From: Martin Trappel (0xCDCDCDCD_at_[hidden])
Date: 2008-08-12 03:46:29

Mathieu Peyréga wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm currently writting an open source and portable (Win32 / OS X / 
> Linux) software, and i'm using parts of boost libraries, especially for 
> the issue described here :
> 
> - boost serialization
> - boost filesystem
> 
> At some point, i'm storing a directory name (as a std::string) into a 
> xml file through boost serialization library.
> 
> The encoding occurs on a windows platform, and as far as i can 
> understand (i'm really new to all these character set issues) it seems 
> to be done in win1252 character set.
> 
If it's an xml file there is no 'seems'. An XML file always has a well 
defined encoding or else it's tag-soup - or whatever the term :)

The filename in the std::string however may well be win1252, and I'd say 
this is already a problem, because on Windows path-elements are Unicode 
encoded and if you use a singlebyte character set you will always hit 
problems sooner or later.
I recommend encoding the path elements as UTF-8 if you want to stick 
with std::string.

> (...)

br,
Martin