Re: Support for std::wstring

From:
"peter koch" <peter.koch.larsen@gmail.com>
Newsgroups:
comp.lang.c++
Date:
7 Jul 2006 01:20:01 -0700
Message-ID:
<1152260400.997163.179380@m73g2000cwd.googlegroups.com>
Bronek Kozicki skrev:

peter koch <peter.koch.larsen@gmail.com> wrote:

Yes - all conforming compilers will support std::wstring. I doubt you
can find a compiler that supports std::string but not std::wstring.


libstdc++ port for Windows (as bundled with mingw compiler) does not
support std::wstring, because its implementation is dependent on
POSIX-style locale. But one can always use STLPort, which does support
std::wstring with this compiler.


I forgot that - thanks for reminding me.

    Another related question that I have is, is it advisable to use
wstring than string for unicode support? To be able to support
Unicode build, is it that all the occurrence of std::string will
need to be changed to std::wstring?

Hold on. std::wstring is not necesarrily unicode.


indeed, but on platforms that directly support Unicode on the operating
system level, wchar_t usually is some Unicode encoding (on Windows 2000
or newer it's UTF-16). I'd say that it's OK to use std::wstring and
wchar_t to handle Unicode strings if both are true:
- you do not care which encoding is used
- you do not target exotic platforms where wchar_t is not Unicode at all


I part of agree here. You can not use std::wstring as a generic unicode
string in Windows as the representation is encoded using the same
principle as for utf-8. Thus, s[i] might not necesarrily return the
i'th character of s. If you are aware of this (or only process
characters in the basic plane), you are safe.

/Peter

B.

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