Any plans on adding support for parsing wchar_t in the program_options
I don't know how important conversions are to other people. When I write a Unicode program it is pure. I expect to use all Unicode characters, strings, and literals. I expect that I will have to handle any required conversions outside the library. I agree with the suggestion to set it up with just the specializations for char and wchar_t similar to std::string and std::wstring. Regards, Bryan Leppard Neotechnology Consultants Ltd. -----Original Message----- From: Vladimir Prus [mailto:ghost@cs.msu.su] Sent: February 14, 2004 9:29 AM To: Boost mailing list; Bryan Leppard Subject: Re: [boost] program_options wchar_t support Hi Bryan, lib?
It is hard coded with std::string right now which makes it kind of useless in a program where argv is a wchar_t**.
The review manager indicated that unicode (~= whar_t) support is needed for the final version of library, so yes, there are such plans. The problem is that it's probably the only planned change for which I haven't yet decided the design.
It could be templatized so that it can be based on any kind of std::basic_string.
Alas, that would break ability to put all sources in a library -- thereby increasing compile time for users who don't need wchar_t support.
Alternatively, you could use preprocessor defines to control whether it builds for ANSI or UNICODE. This would probably be adequate for its intended use as well as less complicated to implement but I suspect it would not be portable enough for BOOST.
That's an option too. Could you answer a couple a questions to help me with design: 1. Do you need wchar_t for option values, or for option names too? 2. Do you plan to mix char and wchar_t? If so, how 'char' is to be converted to wchar_t? What if I require to provide a converting function for that case? 3. If you plan to use wchar_t for option names, how will use specify names in code? Using unicode literals or using some specific 8-bit encoding? If the latter, how convertion to unicode is to be done? Again, is user-provided converter okay for you? Thanks, Volodya