Re: [Boost-users] UTF-16

Subject: Re: [Boost-users] UTF-16
From: Zachary Turner (divisortheory_at_[hidden])
Date: 2009-06-15 14:12:52

On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 10:45 AM, Robert Dailey<rcdailey_at_[hidden]> wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 15, 2009 at 3:55 AM, Boris Schaeling <boris_at_[hidden]> wrote:
>>
>> On Sun, 14 Jun 2009 21:41:16 +0200, Robert Dailey <rcdailey_at_[hidden]>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> [...]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
>>
>> The conversion routines you are looking for are std::mbsrtowcs() and
>> std::wcsrtombs() in <cwchar>. You must set the global locale first before
>> you use them so they know which multi-byte encoding they should use (try for
>> example "en_US.UTF-8"). If you want your application to work on Windows,
>> too, you can't use those functions unfortunately but must use
>> MultiByteToWideChar() and WideCharToMultiByte() instead (as there is no
>> UTF-8 locale on Windows).
>>
>> The Unicode FAQ for Unix and Linux might also help:
>> http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html
>
> Boris,
> This is a good idea. I had thought about this, but I was hoping there was a
> more portable solution already out there. If not, then I could just create a
> simple abstraction for the platform specific routines.
> Thanks for your help (And to everyone else as well)!

The probelm with this approach, if I'm not mistaken, is that different
encodings have different names across operating systems, and even
across different linux distros.  So if you see en_US.UTF-8 on one
distro, it might be something else on another distro.  Correct me if
I'm wrong