From: Erik Wien [mailto:wien@start.no] Sent: October 20, 2004 14:37
- Why would the user want to change the encoding? Especially between UTF-16 and UTF-32?
Well... Different people have different needs. If you are mostly using ASCII characters, and require small size, UTF-8 would fit your bill. If you need the best general performance on most operations, use UTF-16. If you need fast iteration over code points and size doesn't matter, use UTF-32.
another argument is legacy / compatibility. I'v written an XML library in C++ that essentially wraps a C library (libxml2 for the insiders), and so I'd like to avoid unnecessary string copies when passing data around. While the inside uses utf-8, I want to make the wrapper API adaptive to user-side unicode APIs. Thus the unicode type has become a template parameter, and conversion is being done by a trait class. Regards, Stefan