Re: [Boost-users] UTF-16

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] UTF-16
From: Zachary Turner (divisortheory_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-06-14 17:00:13

On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 2:41 PM, Robert Dailey<rcdailey_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On Sun, Jun 14, 2009 at 1:08 PM, Zachary Turner <divisortheory_at_[hidden]>
> wrote:
>>
>> An application I currently work on is stricken with this.  If (like
>> us) you are just trying to provide basic internationalization across
>> Windows and Linux and want it to "just work" and be simple, then I
>> would suggest typedefing something like
>>
>> typedef std::wstring utf_string;
>> typedef boost::filesystem::wpath utf_path;
>> typedef wchar_t utf_char;
>>
>> etc on windows, and
>>
>> typedef std::string utf_string;
>> typedef boost::filesystem::path utf_path;
>> typedef char utf_char;
>>
>> on Linux.  Then just use a simple UTF-8 <-> UTF-16 conversion if ever
>> you need to persist / retrieve something, so that it's stored in a
>> common format.  We're getting many strange problems relating to
>> locales when we try to use UTF-16 in wpaths on Linux, and if it's not
>> too much effort it's going to be simpler to just have your program
>> always store them in the native format that the OS is expecting.
>
> Great advice Zach. I'll definitely do this. However, it would be nice to
> have an already-made conversion routine for UTF8 to UTF16. I'm hoping that
> most of the cases where I'm converting encodings will be when I'm going
> through another library where it has already been handled, like wxWidgets or
> boost.

Yea definitely.  I know there's a Boost.Unicode library in the works,
although I don't know the status.