Re: ustring::compose and win32

[Robert Pearce <rob bdt-home demon co uk>]

Hi Bastien,

On Thu, 19 May 2011 17:55:22 +0200 you wrote:
> 
> This is a runtime exception.
> A Glib::ConvertError with this message : "La conversion du jeu de
> caractères « WCHAR_T » vers « UTF-8 » n'est pas prise en charge" in
> what().

Windows (since 2K-pro) uses UTF-16 "wide" characters internally,
because it allows more languages to be supported than traditional ASCII
and is less chaotic than the multitude of "code pages" that Win9x
needed. However it's not ASCII compatible, unlike UTF-8. Gtk uses UTF-8
because it's the world-wide standard for doing it right.

> 
> I attached a sample. Throws at line 7 under windows, works under Linux.

Linux doesn't use stupid wide characters - it has something vaguely
like code pages but all modern distros support UTF-8. So Gtk never has
to try converting from an incompatible WCHAR_T type.

Now, it should be possible to do the WCHAR_T to UTF-8 conversion and
the Windows port of GTK should support it, but you may not have
everything you need installed. And at that point my knowledge hits a
limit, since I don't do Windows.

Cheers,
Rob