Re: [xml] libxml vs stl

[Stefan Seefeld <seefeld sympatico ca>]

Daniel Veillard wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 22, 2005 at 01:17:49PM -0500, Stefan Seefeld wrote:
>
> > You probably want some unicode library in conjunction with libxml2.
>
>
>   libxml2 uses UTF-8 which covers the full Unicode range, so this does not
> make much sense. The API is already Unicode ready.

Sorry for being unclear. I didn't mean to suggest that libxml2 wouldn't
handle unicode data by itself. Rather, I was thinking from a user's point
of view, who wants to operate on some xml content.

> > The remaining question then is about how to pass data between that unicode
> > library and libxml2.
>
>
>   Stick to UTF-8 !
>
>
> > I have been suggesting a new C++ API (wrapper around libxml2) on boost.org
> > (http://boost.org/) and a big part of the discussion is precisly about how
> > best to do that conversion (see 
> > http://lists.boost.org/Archives/boost/2005/10/96129.php)
>
>
>   Don't do conversion and keep UTF-8, converting back and forth all the time
> bustring by substring is gonna be quite costly, probably more than the cost
> of parsing the data.

We agree that this is the best option. However, users may not be in control
of all application layers, and so at some point a conversion may be required.
Ideally some conversion mechanism can be provided that only allocates / copies
data if absolutely necessary, and passes utf-8 strings through, if possible.

Regards,
                Stefan