Re: [Cppunit-devel] Toward True Unicode Code... Help requested

[Duane M. <dua...@ma...>]

My two cents for what its worth is to do nothing.

There is no "True" Unicode. There are several unicode formats. UTF-8,
UTF-16, and the upcoming UTF-32 among others. I have been told by some
associates that keep up with such things that UTF-16, while currently
being used, is on its way out in favor of UTF-32. It is most often
recommended to use the simple UTF-8 for most applications.

UTF-8 will likely satisfy most of us and require absolutlely no changes.
UTF-8 is completely compatible with ASCII (for characters < 128). UTF-8
fits nicely in a standard string. Anyone that is concerned about such
things has already worked around any problems involved in using UTF-8
with std::string. This mostly involved parsing and locating character
seperations which is of little concern to CppUnit.

Another reason to do nothing is that I would hope that the C++ standards
committee at least makes some statement about Unicode or
internationalization. They have done lots of work to put in
infrastructure that very few people really understand. I believe that
they need to make some statement or show some examples of how to truly
deal with Unicode.

My recommendation is to do nothing.

Is there some other driving factor behind this decision?

--- At Fri, 14 Jun 2002 12:11:46 +0200, Baptiste Lepilleur wrote:

>    I intend to give CppUnit true UNICODEsupport in assertion message (the
>description of the failure, returned by Exception::what()).
>
>    CppUnit should be able to deal with *both* ANSI and UNICODE string. It's
>likely that not every unit tests in a project will use one of those
>exclusively.
>
>    The current solution I found to this problem is to introduce a wrapper
>string class that can be constructed from either ANSI or UNICODE string
>(kind of like the MFC CString). That class would also provides accessor to
>retreive the string as either ANSI or UNICODE. Conversion from on format to
>another would be done automatically.
>
>    Exception and NotEqualException would be modified to use the string
>class described above, as well as Asserter functions (functions that 'do'
>the assertion by creating the Exception and throwing it).
>
>    That solution have the advantage of having little impact on the existing
>code (both CppUnit and user). Most impact will likely be on Outputter (I
>have some really twistest ideas for this, but that for later). Does anybody
>see another solution ? Suggestions ?
>
>    On a more technical side, I'm not very familar with Unicode on Windows
>(never made an application that truely use Unicode), and just about nothing
>on Unix. So here are some questions:
>
>    1) Is std::wstring available on all plateform ?
>    2) Are std::wcout, std::wcerr available on all plateform ?
>    3) Is the attached code fragment the correct way to do the conversion
>between std::string and std::wstring on Windows.
>    4) How do we do the conversion on Unix ? Would a dummy conversion (to
>and fro iso-latin1) do ?


 ...Duane

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