RE: UTF-8 editor support in Debian?
> On Thu, 5 Jul 2001, dparsons@emerall.com wrote:
> >
> > What are the main issues that need to be thought about? Is it as
> > simple as using w_char instead of char in the code, or is there more
> > to it than that? Can a general "plan of attack" be summarised in a
> > couple of paragraphs?
>
> That depends. wchar_t is in general not portable, since it is defined
> by the relevant standards as locale dependent, and could be as little
> as 8 bits. Moreover, the standard C mbs* and wcs* interfaces are
> extremely limited and hard to use for any real work. Even worse,
> there are a lot of extremely buggy versions around. You can in
> general only counton wchar_t being Unicode based if you are a glibc
> based system. In particular, this is not so for any of the free BSDs
> or Solaris etc.
If you want to write new code that uses Unicode, needs to be portable
outside of glibc systems, and don't mind adding a dependency to one more
package, check out ICU, which I package for Debian (in the unstable dist).
The ICU project page is at http://oss.software.ibm.com/icu/. It is a very
versatile C/C++ library for Unicode. I had written my own Unicode library 4
years ago, and started contributing to ICU instead when it became Open
Source. We use it in a cross-platform environment, and it works very well.
YA
Reply to: