Thread: Is a guide to (portable) use of unicode for idiots out there?

  1. 11-30-2006 #1
    pheres
    pheres is offline
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    Is a guide to (portable) use of unicode for idiots out there?

    Hi,

    I read the whole day on google about making apps unicode ready. the more i read the more i got lost. wchar, tchar, main, tmain, winmain, cout, wcout, uc2, utf8, multibyte, std or external libs, the next say one has to do nothing if the OS has unicodesupport included...argh

    Do you know a little tutorial about how to write unicode aware apps on hello-world-level or slightely above that a portable at least between winXP+ and an actual linux? Best would be with little examples showing 1. this is the best way to handle input/output 2. processing/converting that strings internally or something like that.

    thank you in advance!
  2. 11-30-2006 #2
    Cat
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    There's very little in the way of portable Unicode, especially because different operating systems use different types of Unicode; Linux uses UTF-8 (where a string is an array of 8 bit characters), while Win2000/NT/Vista use UTF-16 (where a string is an array of 16 bit characters).

    The only way to get true "portability" would be with conditional compilation; e.g.

    Code:
    #ifdef WIN32
typedef std::wstring unicodestring
#else
typedef std::string unicodestring
#endif
    and just do that in every place that absolutely needs OS-specific features to work.
    You ever try a pink golf ball, Wally? Why, the wind shear on a pink ball alone can take the head clean off a 90 pound midget at 300 yards.
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