Unicode in C

[Elazar Leibovich]

The simplest option is, to accept StringPiece-like structure (pointer to
buffer + size), and encoding, then to convert the data internally to your
encoding (say, ISO-8859-8, replacing illegal characters with whitespace),
and convert the other output back.

Do you mind using iconv-like library?

On Mon, Mar 12, 2012 at 3:05 PM, Nadav Har'El <nyh at math.technion.ac.il>wrote:

> Hi, I have a question that I was sort of sad that I couldn't readily
> find the answer to...
>
> Let's say I want to create a C API (a C library), with functions which
> take strings as arguments. What am I supposed to use if I want these
> strings
> to be in any language? Obviously the answer is "Unicode", but that
> doesn't really answer the question... How is Unicode used in C?
>
> As far as I can see, there are two major approaches to this problem.
>
> One approach, used in the Win32 C APIs on MS-Windows, and also in Java and
> other languages, is to use "wide characters" - characters of 16 or 32 bit
> size, and strings are an array of such characters.
>
> The second approach, proposed by Plan 9, is to use UTF-8.
>
> I personally like better the UTF-8 approach, because it naturally fits
> with C's "char *" type and with Linux's system calls (which take char*,
> not any sort of wide characters), but I'm completely unsure that this is
> what users actually want. If not, then I wonder, why?
>
> Some background on this question: People have been complaining for years
> that Hspell, and in particular the libhspell functions, use ISO-8859-8
> instead of "unicode". But if one wants to add unicode to libhspell, what
> should it be? UTF-8? Wide chars (UTF-16 or UTF-32)?
>
> Thanks,
> Nadav.
>
> --
> Nadav Har'El                        |                    Monday, Mar 12
> 2012,
> nyh at math.technion.ac.il
> |-----------------------------------------
> Phone +972-523-790466, ICQ 13349191 |We could wipe out world hunger if we
> knew
> http://nadav.harel.org.il           |how to make AOL's Free CD's edible!
>
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