Re: Interest in a Unicode library for Boost?

From: Zach Laine (whatwasthataddress_at_[hidden])
Date: 2019-11-02 19:00:57

On Sat, Nov 2, 2019 at 4:12 AM Rainer Deyke via Boost-users <
boost-users_at_[hidden]> wrote:

> On 01.11.19 22:22, Zach Laine via Boost-users wrote:
> > Moreover, I don't know of a great use case for a boost::text::is_alpha().
> > Specifically, it seams that if you are looking for alphabetical
> characters,
> > you are usually doing something like word-breaking, for which there is
> > already an algorithm, doing a regex match, for which is_alpha() is
> > insufficient, etc.  I'm open to hearing about such use cases, of course.
>
> Filtering text input.  Parsing programming languages or data description
> languages.  Gathering statistics on a piece of text.
>
> My own codebase has has four instances of #include <cctype> and three
> instances of #include <ctype.h>, but that's an artificially low number
> because character classification is trivial to do by hand for ASCII and
> because cctype doesn't support Unicode.  Exactly zero of these instances
> can be replaced by any algorithm provided by the proposed library.  All
> of them could technically be replaced by regular expressions, but only
> in the sense that it is possible to (inefficiently) implement the cctype
> interface in terms of regular expressions.
>

These use cases fall under the regex use case I mentioned.  I still think
they're more appropriately solved that way.  Have you heard of CTRE?  Hana
is working on adding Unicode support to that, including character classes
like is_alpha.

Zach