Re: iconv trouble

From:
Daniel Luis dos Santos <daniel.dlds@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
Fri, 29 May 2009 22:19:32 +0100
Message-ID:
<4a205169$0$11736$a729d347@news.telepac.pt>
On 2009-05-29 19:59:50 +0100, Daniel Luis dos Santos
<daniel.dlds@gmail.com> said:

Hello,

I am trying to make a function that converts WCHAR_T strings to UTF-8.
After experimenting for a while, found out that I can only convert
standard ASCII chars. When I put a vowel with an accent (for example) I
always get a EILSEQ in errno. I am trying to convert using the
following test function :

void convTest() {

    wchar_t *str = L"a ?tring";

    char *inBuf = (char*)str;
    size_t inBufSize = sizeof(wchar_t)*wcslen(str);

    char *outBuf = (char*)malloc(1024);
    size_t outBufAvailSize = sizeof(char)*1024;

    iconv_t ds = iconv_open("UTF-8", "WCHAR_T");
    size_t converted = iconv(ds, &inBuf, &inBufSize, &outBuf, &outBufAvailSize);
    if (converted == (size_t)-1)
        if (errno == EILSEQ)
            printf("invalid char sequence");
        else if (errno == EINVAL)
            printf("incomplete input");
        else if (errno == E2BIG)
            printf("not enough space");
}

The ? character causes an EILSEQ. I am in portugal with a portuguese keyboard.
Help !


Ok,

I noticed in a terminal window that the locale was C, and from the
glibc docs learned that at startup the current locale of any C program
is also C.

I then called
<code>setlocale(LC_ALL, "pt_PT.UTF-8");</code>
before calling the function in the previous post and the iconv call succeeded.

But now I am confused. Isn't UTF-8 locale independent ? I was supposing
that UTF-8 contained every possible character and that a conversion
existed between it and wchar_t.

What if in my program I want decode characters from different locales
than the one on my machine ? From what I've learned from the glibc
docs, the call to setlocale sets the locale machine-wide, so that is
not an option as it would mess up other programs, right ?

How do you deal with this when a single program must handle multiple locales ?

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