From: Dave Abrahams <dave@boostpro.com>
Peter Dimov wrote:
Alexander Lamaison wrote:
I'm opposed to this strategy simply because it differs from the way existing libraries treat narrow strings.
It differs from them because it's right, and existing libraries are wrong. Unfortunately, they'll continue being wrong for a long time, because of this same argument.
Does the "right" strategy come with some policies/practices that can allow it to coexist with the existing "wrong" libraries? If so, I'm all +1 on it.
Combining old libraries with new ones: ====================================== It would be simple to combine a library that uses old policies with new ones. namespace boost { std::string utf8_to_ansi(std::string const &s); std::string ansi_to_utf8(std::string const &s); std::wstring utf8_to_wide(std::string const &s); std::string wide_to_utf8(std::wstring const &s); } - If it supports wide strings call boost::utf8_to_wide **under Windows platform** and nothing is lost. - If it supports only narrow strings: a) if it is encoding agnostic: like some unit-test that only open files named with ASCII names, then you can safely ignore and pass UTF-8 string as ASCII and ASCII as UTF-8 as is the subset of it. b) Do following: 1. Fill a bug to library owner on not-supporting Unicode strings under Windows. 2. Use utf8_to_ansi/ansi_to_utf8 to pass strings to this library under Windows. Current State of Using Wide/ANSI API in Boost: ============================================== I've did a small search to find which libraries use what API: Following use both types of API: ------------------------------- thread asio system iostreams regex filesystem According to new policy they should replace ANSI api by wide api and conversion between UTF-8 and UTF-16 Following libraries use only ANSI API -------------------------------------- interprocess spirit test random The should replace their ANSI api by Wide one with a simple glue of utf8_to_wide/wide_to_utf8 Following libraries use STL functions that are not aware of unicode under windows --------------------------------------------------------------------------------- std::fstream - Serialization - Graph - wave - datetime - property_tree - progam_options fopen - gil - spirit - python - regex Need to replace with something like: boost::fstream and boost::fopen that work with UTF-8 under windows. The rest of the libraries seems to be encoding agnostic. Artyom