From: Stefan Seefeld (sseefeld_at_[hidden])
Date: 2004-10-20 13:50:19
> From: Erik Wien [mailto:wien_at_[hidden]]
> Sent: October 20, 2004 14:37
> > - Why would the user want to change the encoding? Especially between
> > UTF-16 and UTF-32?
>
> Well... Different people have different needs. If you are
> mostly using ASCII
> characters, and require small size, UTF-8 would fit your
> bill. If you need
> the best general performance on most operations, use UTF-16.
> If you need
> fast iteration over code points and size doesn't matter, use UTF-32.
another argument is legacy / compatibility. I'v written an XML library
in C++ that essentially wraps a C library (libxml2 for the insiders),
and so I'd like to avoid unnecessary string copies when passing data
around.
While the inside uses utf-8, I want to make the wrapper API adaptive
to user-side unicode APIs. Thus the unicode type has become a template
parameter, and conversion is being done by a trait class.
Regards,
Stefan