Re: Internationalising strings

[Ben Pfaff]

John Darrington <address@hidden> writes:

> But I think that converting existing arrays of char into arrays of
> wchar_t might be easier to apply to existing code.  The problem with
> multi-byte sequences is that one cannot index into them, or use
> pointer increments to iterate thought them.  A few calls to mbstowcs
> and some well chosen replacements of "char" with "wchar_t", might do a
> lot of the work for us.

It is possible.  Wide strings sure are simpler, in so many ways,
than multibyte strings.  At this point, I am undecided on whether
it is the right thing to do.  I need some time to look closer.

It is clearly not right to translate case data into wide strings,
because they do not necessarily contain character data; they may
simply be binary octets.

> Now if only we'd used C++, then we could simply overload the *
> operator with a call to mbui_cur, and the *++ operator with
> mbui_advance ..... 

I'm going to ignore that comment.  It raises too many strong,
conflicting emotions.
-- 
"doe not call up Any that you can not put downe."
--H. P. Lovecraft