If I understand well, it is possible to use both string and wstring to store UTF-8 text.
With char, ASCII characters take a single byte, some chinese characters take 3 or 4, etc. Which means that str[3] doesn't necessarily point to the 4th character.
With wchar_t same thing, but the minimal amount of bytes used per characters is always 2 (instead of 1 for char), and a 3 or 4 byte wide character will take 2 wchar_t.
Right ?
So, what if I want to use string::find_first_of() or string::compare(), etc with such a weirdly encoded string ? Will it work ? Does the string class handle the fact that characters have a variable size ? Or should I only use them as dummy feature-less byte arrays, in which case I'd rather go for a wchar_t[] buffer.
If std::string doesn't handle that, second question: are there libraries providing string classes that could handle that UTF-8 encoding so that str[3] actually points to the 3rd character (which would be a byte array from length 1 to 4) ?
You are talking about Unicode. Unicode uses 32 bits to represent a character. However since that is wasting memory there are more compact encodings. UTF-8 is one such encoding. It assumes that you are using byte units and it maps Unicode characters to 1, 2, 3 or 4 bytes. UTF-16 is another that is using words as units and maps Unicode characters to 1 or 2 words (2 or 4 bytes).
You can use both encoding with both string and wchar_t. UTF-8 tends to be more compact for english text/numbers.
Some things will work regardless of encoding and type used (compare). However all functions that need to understand one character will be broken. I.e the 5th character is not always the 5th entry in the underlying array. It might look like it's working with certain examples but It will eventually break.
string::compare will work but do not expect to get alphabetical ordering. That is language dependent.
string::find_first_of will work for some but not all. Long string will likely work just because they are long while shorter ones might get confused by character alignment and generate very hard to find bugs.
Best thing is to find a library that handles it for you and ignore the type underneath (unless you have strong reasons to pick one or the other).
You can't handle Unicode with std::string or any other tools from Standard Library. Use external library such as: http://utfcpp.sourceforge.net/
You are correct for those:
...Which means that str[3] doesn't necessarily point to the 4th character...only use them as dummy feature-less byte arrays...
string of C++ can only handle ascii characters. This is different from the String of Java, which can handle Unicode characters. You can store the encoding result (bytes) of Chinese characters into string (char in C/C++ is just byte), but this is meaningless as string just treat the bytes as ascii chars, so you cannot use string function to process it.
wstring may be something you need.
There is something that should be clarified. UTF-8 is just an encoding method for Unicode characters (transforming characters from/to byte format).
Related
I have an application, accepting a UTF-8 string of a maximum 255 characters.
If the characters are ASCII, (characters number == size in bytes).
If the characters are not all ASCII and contains Japanese letters for example, given the size in bytes, how can I get the number of characters in the string?
Input: char *data, int bytes_no
Output: int char_no
You can use mblen to count the length or use mbstowcs
source:
http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/cstdlib/mblen/
http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/unicode.html#mod
The number of characters can be counted in C in a portable way using
mbstowcs(NULL,s,0). This works for UTF-8 like for any other supported
encoding, as long as the appropriate locale has been selected. A
hard-wired technique to count the number of characters in a UTF-8
string is to count all bytes except those in the range 0x80 – 0xBF,
because these are just continuation bytes and not characters of their
own. However, the need to count characters arises surprisingly rarely
in applications.
you can save a unicode char in a wide char wchar_t
There's no such thing as "character".
Or, more precisely, what "character" is depends on whom you ask.
If you look in the Unicode glossary you will find that the term has several not fully compatible meanings. As a smallest component of written language that has semantic value (the first meaning), á is a single character. If you take á and count basic unit of encoding for the Unicode character encoding (the third meaning) in it, you may get either one or two, depending on what exact representation (normalized or denormalized) is being used.
Or maybe not. This is a very complicated subject and nobody really knows what they are talking about.
Coming down to earth, you probably need to count code points, which is essentially the same as characters (meaning 3). mblen is one method of doing that, provided your current locale has UTF-8 encoding. Modern C++ offers more C++-ish methods, however, they are not supported on some popular implementations. Boost has something of its own and is more portable. Then there are specialized libraries like ICU which you may want to consider if your needs are much more complicated than counting characters.
I have to code in an application which is in Unicode UTF-8 in Windows, MSVC 10. I'm aware that the UTF-8 encoded strings would use either 1 or 2 bytes per character. So, my question is : Is std::string suitable for this? If yes, how do I decode the strings? As far as I understand std::string is just an array of bytes and it doesn't provide any decoding logic.
How can I know the logical length of the string? How can I extract logical characters from a string? Are there any libraries which helps me to extract logical characters from the string?
e.g : If I have the string "olé" in std::string, I need to know that the length is 3, but not 4.
A commonally used library is ICU - International Components for Unicode
Yes, std::string is appropriare but as you’ve noticed it only operates on bytes, not Unicode code points. In that, std::string is an opaque type; this isn’t necessarily bad (in fact, it does have some advantages, see the links below for information) but it makes it necessary to decode the string if you need information about characters.
For the actual handling of UTF-8 (where necessary), you can use the Boost.NoWide library to decode UTF-8.
Furthermore, I suggest reading the UTF-8 everywhere manifesto for some information about the use of UTF-8 vs. other Unicode transformations.
First you may want to call the mbstowcs() function to transform the UTF-8 characters to wide characters. Then if you want the result to be 8 bits, you'll have a loss of data in the event you have "Unicode" characters (characters outside of the ISO-8859-1 plane, also called Latin 1.)
Note that the "Windows" encoding is not 1 to 1 equivalent to ISO-8859-1, but in most cases ISO-8859-1 is what people use these days.
Reference: http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/cstdlib/mbstowcs/
Okay, if you just want the length in characters, use the mblen() function:
len = mblen(str.c_str(), str.length());
Additional note: an easy way to implementation mblen() is to count the number of bytes that are not between 0x80 and 0xBF since those are part of a multi-bytes sequence. This is particularly useful if you receive a UTF-8 byte sequence over a flaky serial connection.
Why are string classes implemented in several different ways and what are the advantages and disadvantages? I have seen it done several differents ways
Only using a simple char (most basic way).
Supporting UTF8 and UTF16 through a templated string, such as string<UTF8>. Where UTF8 is a char and UTF16 is an unsigned short.
Having both a UTF8 and UTF16 in the string class.
Are there any other ways to implement a string class that may be better?
As far as I know std::basic_string<wchar_t> where sizeof(wchar_t) == 2 is not UTF16 encoding. There are more than 2^16 characters in unicode, and codes go at least up to 0xFFFFF which is > 0xFFFF (2byte wchar_t capacity). As a result, proper UTF16 should use variable number of bytes per letter (one 2byte wchar_t or two of them), which is not the case with std::basic_string and similar classes that assume that one string element == one character.
As far as I know there are two ways to deal with unicode strings.
Either use big enough type to fit any character into single string element (for example, on linux it is quite normal to see sizeof(wchar_t) == 4), so you'll be able to enjoy "benefits" (basically, easy string length calculation and nothing else) of std::string-like classes.
Or use variable-length encoding (UTF8 - 1..4 bytes per char or UTF16 - 2..4 bytes per char), and well-tested string class that provides string-manipulation routines.
As long as you don't use char it doesn't matter which method you use. char-based strings are likely to cause trouble on machines with different 8bit codepage, if you weren't careful enough to take care of that (It is safe to assume that you'll forget about it and won't be careful enough - Microsoft Applocale was created for a reason).
Unicode contains plenty of non-printable characters (control and formatting characters in unicode), so that pretty much defeats any benefit method #1 could provide. Regardless, if you decide to use method #1, you should remember that wchar_t is not big enough to fit all possible characters on some compilers/platforms (windows/microsoft compiler), and that std::basic_string<wchar_t> is not a perfect solution because of that.
Rendering internationalized text is PAIN, so the best idea would be just to grab whatever unicode-compatible string class (like QString) there is that hopefully comes with text layout engine (that can properly handle control characters and bidirectional text) and concentrate on more interesting programming problems instead.
-Update-
If unsigned short is not UTF16, then what is, unsigned int? What is UTF8 then? Is that unsigned char?
UTF16 is variable-length character encoding. UTF16 uses 1..2 2-byte (i.e. uint16_t, 16 bit) elements per character. I.e. number of of elements in UTF16 string != number of characters in string for UTF16. You can't calculate string length by counting elements.
UTF8 is another variable-length encoding, based on 1byte elements (8 bit, 1 byte or "unsigned char"). One unicode character ("code point") in UTF8 takes 1..4 uint8_t elements. Once again, number of elements in string != number of characters in string. The advantage of UTF8 is characters that exist within ASCII take exactly 1 byte per character in UTF8, which saves a bit of space, while in UTF16, character always takes at least 2 bytes.
UTF32 is fixed-length character encoding, that always uses 32bit (4 bytes or uint32_t) per character. Currently any unicode character can fit into single UTF32 element, and UTF32 will probably remain fixed-length for a long time (I don't think that all languages of Earth combined would produce 2^31 different characters). It wastes more memory, but number of elements in string == number of characters in string.
Also, keep in mind, that C++ standard doesn't specify how big "int" or "short" should be.
let's say i have a char array like "äa".
is there a way to get the ascii value (e.g 228) of the first char, which is a multibyte?
even if i cast my array to a wchar_t * array, i'm not able to get the ascii value of "ä", because its 2 bytes long.
is there a way to do this, im trying for 2 days now :(
i'm using gcc.
thanks!
You're contradicting yourself. International characters like ä are (by definition) not in the ASCII character set, so they don't have an "ascii value".
It depends on the exact encoding of your two-character array, if you can get the code point for a single character or not, and if so which format it will be in.
You are very confused. ASCII only has values smaller than 128. Value 228 corresponds to ä in 8 bit character sets ISO-8859-1, CP1252 and some others. It also is the UCS value of ä in the Unicode system. If you use string literal "ä" and get a string of two characters, the string is in fact encoded in UTF-8 and you may wish to parse the UTF-8 coding to acquire Unicode UCS values.
More likely what you really want to do is converting from one character set to another. How to do this heavily depends on your operating system, so more information is required. You also need to specify what exactly you want? A std::string or char* of ISO-8859-1, perhaps?
There is a standard C++ template function to do that conversion, ctype::narrow(). It is part of the localization library. It will convert the wide character to the equivalent char value for you current local, if possible. As the other answers have pointed out, there isn't always a mapping, which is why ctype::narrow() takes a default character that it will return if there is no mapping.
Depends on the encoding used in your char array.
If your char array is Latin 1 encoded, then it it 2 bytes long (plus maybe a NUL terminator, we don't care), and those 2 bytes are:
0xE4 (lower-case a umlaut)
0x61 (lower-case a).
Note that Latin 1 is not ASCII, and 0xE4 is not an ASCII value, it's a Latin 1 (or Unicode) value.
You would get the value like this:
int i = (unsigned char) my_array[0];
If your char array is UTF-8 encoded, then it is three bytes long, and those bytes are:
binary 11000011 (first byte of UTF-8 encoded 0xE4)
binary 10100100 (second byte of UTF-8 encoded 0xE4)
0x61 (lower-case a)
To recover the Unicode value of a character encoded with UTF-8, you either need to implement it yourself based on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Description (usually a bad idea in production code), or else you need to use a platform-specific unicode-to-wchar_t conversion routine. On linux this is mbstowcs or iconv, although for a single character you can use mbtowc provided that the multi-byte encoding defined for the current locale is in fact UTF-8:
wchar_t i;
if (mbtowc(&i, my_array, 3) == -1) {
// handle error
}
If it's SHIFT-JIS then this doesn't work...
what you want is called transliteration - converting letters of one language to another. it has nothing about unicode and wchars. you need to have a table of mapping.
I'm using TinyXML to parse/build XML files. Now, according to the documentation this library supports multibyte character sets through UTF-8. So far so good I think. But, the only API that the library provides (for getting/setting element names, attribute names and values, ... everything where a string is used) is through std::string or const char*. This has me doubting my own understanding of multibyte character set support. How can a string that only supports 8-bit characters contain a 16 bit character (unless it uses a code page, which would negate the 'supports Unicode' claim)? I understand that you could theoretically take a 16-bit code point and split it over 2 chars in a std::string, but that wouldn't transform the std::string to a 'Unicode' string, it would make it invalid for most purposes and would maybe accidentally work when written to a file and read in by another program.
So, can somebody explain to me how a library can offer an '8-bit interface' (std::string or const char*) and still support 'Unicode' strings?
(I probably mixed up some Unicode terminology here; sorry about any confusion coming from that).
First, utf-8 is stored in const char * strings, as #quinmars said. And it's not only a superset of 7-bit ASCII (code points <= 127 always encoded in a single byte as themselves), it's furthermore careful that bytes with those values are never used as part of the encoding of the multibyte values for code points >= 128. So if you see a byte == 44, it's a '<' character, etc. All of the metachars in XML are in 7-bit ASCII. So one can just parse the XML, breaking strings where the metachars say to, sticking the fragments (possibly including non-ASCII chars) into a char * or std::string, and the returned fragments remain valid UTF-8 strings even though the parser didn't specifically know UTF-8.
Further (not specific to XML, but rather clever), even more complex things genrally just work (tm). For example, if you sort UTF-8 lexicographically by bytes, you get the same answer as sorting it lexicographically by code points, despite the variation in # of bytes used, because the prefix bytes introducing the longer (and hence higher-valued) code points are numerically greater than those for lesser values).
UTF-8 is compatible to 7-bit ASCII code. If the value of a byte is larger then 127, it means a multibyte character starts. Depending on the value of the first byte you can see how many bytes the character will take, that can be 2-4 bytes including the first byte (technical also 5 or 6 are possible, but they are not valid utf-8). Here is a good resource about UTF-8: UTF-8 and Unicode FAQ, also the wiki page for utf8 is very informative. Since UTF-8 is char based and 0-terminated, you can use the standard string functions for most things. The only important thing is that the character count can differ from the byte count. Functions like strlen() return the byte count but not necessarily the character count.
By using between 1 and 4 chars to encode one Unicode code point.