James Porter wrote:
Instead of defining character types per character set, you could use a specialized char_traits class. It contains state_type, which is used with codecvt from the I/O stream library. The default typedef for char and wchar_t is mbstate_t, which appears in the standard specializations for codecvt. (codecvt is used to perform code conversion between character types; it's used in wfstream to convert a stream of chars on disk to wchar_ts in memory.)
If you change state_type in the char_traits, you'd be able to differentiate the various basic_string types and include information about the character encoding without writing a whole lot of new code.
Thanks for the suggestion. I need to learn some more about this corner of "namespace std", clearly, before I go and re-invent something. Phil.