On Fri, 14 Jan 2011 10:42:44 +0100, Matus Chochlik wrote:
Hi,
On Thu, Jan 13, 2011 at 8:21 PM, Artyom <artyomtnk@yahoo.com> wrote:
Hello All,
I wanted to talk about it for a loooooong time. however never got there.
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Proposal Summary: ===================
- We need to treat std::string, char const * as UTF-8 strings on Windows and drop a support of so called ANSI API.
- Optuional but recommended:
Deprecate wide strings as unportable API.
Fully agree. Two years ago I would very probably be advocating some kind of TCHAR/wxChar/QChar/whatever-like character type switching, but since then I've spent a lot of time developing portable GUI applications and found out the hard way that it is better to dump all the ANSI CPXXXX / UTF-XY encodings and stick to UTF-8 and defer the conversion to whatever the native API uses until you make the actual call.
-1 I'm opposed to this strategy simply because it differs from the way existing libraries treat narrow strings. Not least the STL. If you open an fstream with a narrow filename, for instance, this isn't treated as a UTF-8 string. It's treated as being in the local codepage. What the Visual Studio implementation of the STL actually does is pretty much the same as how Boost.Filesystem v3 treats paths: It uses mbstowcs_s to convert the narrow string to the wchar_t form and then uses _wfsopen to open the file. Importantly, mbstowcs_s treats the narrow string as being in the local codepage which on Windows _won't_ be UTF-8. If you tried to open an fstream by handing it a UTF-8 encoded string, you would end up with severe problems. For shits and giggles I tried to open a std::fstream with "שלום-سلام-pease-Мир.txt" as the filename. What it ends up doing is creating a file called "ש×××-سÙا٠-pease-ÐиÑ.txt"! While this behaviour isn't great, it is standard. I don't think we should make boost produce UTF-8 narrow string on Windows. A programmer would expect to be able to take such a string and pass it to STL functions. As you can see, that wouldn't work. Alex -- Easy SFTP for Windows Explorer (http://www.swish-sftp.org)