Re: wstring to ustring conversion

[Chris Vine <chris cvine freeserve co uk>]

On Thursday 21 April 2005 23:13, Emre Turkay wrote:
> Greetings,
>
>   I need to convert std::wstring into glib::ustring. It seems that
>   conversion from/to std::string is included in the ustring and the way
>   is pretty straight forward, however I couldn't figure out the *correct
>   way* to make the conversion from wstring.
>
>   I've been looking into the ustring source code, but it is really
>   overwhelming for a guy who doesn't know anything about the
>   internationalization and character code stuff ;)
>
>   I think, for now I'll go and just write a one by one copy function and
>   use it, however I would like to work on a better solution in the long
>   term. Can you guys give me a pointer for information about it, well
>   ustring compared to wstring would be the best.

That depends on the encoding in your std::wstring, and the character size.   
(I do not use Windows but I think that that used to use 16 bit wide 
characters, which were neither utf16 nor ucs4 but comprised that part of the 
ucs4 character set reproducible as a single 16-bit character, but that may 
now have changed.)  Glib has various conversion functions you could use, not 
all of which are in glibmm, including g_utf8_to_utf16(),
g_utf8_to_ucs4(), and vice versa.  See 
http://developer.gnome.org/doc/API/2.0/glib/glib-Unicode-Manipulation.html

You can use these to make a conversion functor for std::transform and then 
iterate through the source and target strings, but you would need to handle 
conversion errors.

If you wanted to be clever you could also implement std::codecvt stream code 
conversion facets using the Glib functions.

You will not get anywhere with this without learning something about 
internationalisation and character codes.

Chris.

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