From: Alexander Lamaison <awl03@doc.ic.ac.uk>
On Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:13:04 +0100, Matus Chochlik wrote:
I do not believe that UTF-8 is the way to go. In fact I know it is not, except perhaps for the very near future for some programmers ( Linux advocates ).
:-) Just for the record, I'm not a Linux advocate any more then I'm a Windows advocate. I use both .. I'm writing this on a windows machine. What I would like is the whole encoding madness/dysfunction (including but not limited to the dual TCHAR/whateverchar-based interfaces) to stop. Everywhere.
Even if I bought the UTF-8ed-Boost idea, what would we do about the STL implementation on Windows which expects local-codepage narrow strings? Are we hoping MS etc. change these to match? Because otherwise we'll be converting between narrow encodings for the rest of eternity.
Alex
First of all today there **is** problem and STL code can't open file, try to open "שלום-سلام-pease.txt" under Windows using GCC's std::fstream... You can't. I assume with some other compilers it happens as well. There **is** problem ignoring it would not help us. How can we address STL problem and UTF-8? Simply? Provide: boost::basic_fstream boost::fopen boost::freopen boost::remove boost::rename Which are using same std::* classes under Posix platform and UTF-8 aware implementations for Windows. Take a look on this code: http://art-blog.no-ip.info/files/nowide.zip This is the code I use for my projects that implements what I'm talking about - simple easy to use straightforward. Also don't forget two things: 1. Microsoft Deprecated ANSI API and does not recommend to use it. If the only OS that gives us most of the encodings headache deprecated ANSI API I don't think that Boost should continue supporting it. 2. All the world had already moved to Unicode, Microsoft did this as well. They did it in their incompatible-with-rest-of-the-world way... But still they did it too - so we can continue ignoring the fact that UTF-8 is ultimate encoding or go forward. Artyom