On 01/21/2011 01:54 AM, Matus Chochlik wrote:
... elision by patrick... Why not boost::string (explicitly stating in the docs that it is UTF-8-based) ? the name u8string suggests to me that it is meant for some special case of character encoding and the (encoding agnostic/native) std::string is still the way to go.
I think that's the truth. std::string has some performance guarantees that a utf-8 based string wouldn't be able to keep. std::string can do things, and people do things with std::string that a utf-8 based string can't do. If you set LC_COLLATE to en_US.utf8 or the equivalent (I hate the way locale names are not as standardized as you might like), then most of the standard algorithms will be locale aware and operations on your string will be muchly aware of the string encoding. By switching locales, you can then operate on strings with other encodings. utf-8_string isn't intended to operate like that. It's specialized.
IMO we should send the message that UTF-8 is "normal"/"(semi-)standard"/"de-facto-standard" and the other encodings like the native_t (or even ansi_t, ibm_cp_xyz_t, string16_t, string32_t, ...) are the special cases and they should be treated as such. Why would people want to lose so much of the functionality of std::string? The only advantage of a utf8_string would be automatic and continual verification that it's a valid utf-8 encoded string that otherwise acts as much as possible like a std::string. For that you would give up a lot of other functionality.
Patrick