On Mon, Jan 23, 2012 at 4:46 AM, Yakov Galka <ybungalobill@gmail.com> wrote:
As Artyom said you can imbue whatever locale you want to specify the conversion form narrow to wide strings. It will make almost all the conversions transparent, except that the path will still be stored as UTF-16 on windows.
So far, so good.
Unfortunately it boils to the interface whence you can get a c_str() to a UTF-16 string only.
That's not correct. If you have a path p, and the imbued codecvt if UTF-8, you can always get a UTF-8 narrow string by writing p.string<std::string>(), so you can always write p.string<std::string>().c_str() if you want a const char* to a UTF-8 encoded narrow string. If your app mostly needs UTF-8 strings, use std::string and only convert to a path when a path is actually needed. If your app mostly needs paths, use boost::filesystem::path and only convert to std::string when a std::string or const char* is actually needed.
You may want to revert to Boost.Filesystem.v2 (afaik removed completely in 1.48 so you'll need to merge from the old release), it is better designed in the sense that it has a templatized basic_path that allows you to store utf-8 encoding internally (once you imbue the correct locale) and convert to UTF-16 on demand.
V2 is no longer supported and bugs are not being fixed. --Beman