C++ and internationalization/localization

[kasthurirangan.balaji]

Hi,

I am looking for advice on i18n/l10n using c++. I understand about
wchar & wstreams. I have gone thru the net for some knowledge. All
speak of encodings like utf8/utf16/iso8859 and so. I also see that by
using utf8, we can achieve i18n and l10n using char itself. It would
be great if someone can provide or point out resources in c++ with
lots of example programs. Books are also welcome. References should
speak of persistence, network communications.

Thanks,
Balaji.

[Martin York]

Have a look at ICU:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/glob.../icu/index.jsp

Basically you want to store the data in some portable format (one of
the UTF-X formats is easy). How you display it is then OS dependent.
But this is where ICU comes in. It basically allows conversion from
anything to anything and UTF is a good starting point (though it will
depend on your requirements).

Most modern OS's Win/Mac usually have Unicode API for displaying text
(not sure about UNIX). The basic char API's are now usually a simple
wrappers that call the Unicode version of the same function after some
conversion (usually).

Hope that helps.

[kasthurirangan.balaji]

On Feb 5, 4:11*am, Martin York <[e-mail]:

Have a look at ICU:

http://www-306.ibm.com/software/glob.../icu/index.jsp

Basically you want to store the data in some portable format (one of
the UTF-X formats is easy). How you display it is then OS dependent.
But this is where ICU comes in. It basically allows conversion from
anything to anything and UTF is a good starting point (though it will
depend on your requirements).

Most modern OS's Win/Mac usually have Unicode API for displaying text
(not sure about UNIX). The basic char API's are now usually a simple
wrappers that call the Unicode version of the same function after some
conversion (usually).

Hope that helps.

Thanks Daniel/Martin. Just started looking at ICU. Isn't it possible
to use the locale features of c++ - i purchased the book "Standard C++
Streams and Locales - Langer/Kreft". Can i not use void * to store the
data and use encoders/decoders - like read first few bytes and based
on them find out the encoding and then apply the corresponding
decoding and then display within their locale. Also i would like to
know about utf8 vs utf16. I came across utf8cpp(sourgeforge.net) which
is an utf8 c++ lib, but it has got converters for utf16 too. I do not
know why?
I may be totally wrong as i am very much new to this subject.

Thanks,
Balaji.