std::string and UTF-8 encoded unicode

Question

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) ?

Answer 1

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. Ie 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).

Answer 2

You can't handle Unicode with std::string or any other tools from Standard Library. Use external library such as: http://utfcpp.sourceforge.net/

Answer 3

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).