Unicorn: C++ Unicode string library

https://github.com/CaptainCrowbar/unicorn-lib

by captaincrowbar • 10 years ago

66 30 10 years ago

maaku• 10 years ago

Your github pages breaks the back button.

No idea what you mean, sorry. I'm just using Github's automatically generated web pages, so if there's a problem there it's probably a Github issue.

geekone• 10 years ago

Probably referring to the Documentation link you provide on the GitHub page, and it breaks back button for me too.

sdegutis• 10 years ago

That's not fair. It's pretty well known that Github uses JS to hijack page navigation and make it "smoother" for people. And of course that's going to be faulty, and I emailed them years ago when they made the switch, and asked them to make it an optional behavior because I hate it. But that has nothing to do with OP or OP's link or content. It's like judging a book by the book store.

xjia• 10 years ago

Anyone can compare this to Boost.Nowide?

aurelian15• 10 years ago

Looks like a nice project. I'm currently searching for a Unicode library and it appears to me that ICU is the de-facto standard here, which has the benefit of comming pre-installed on pretty much any Linux distribution. Any reason why I should use Unicorn instead? I couldn't find information on how it compares to ICU in the documentation (well, except for the most welcome usage of modern C++).

rspeer2• 10 years ago

It looks like Unicorn can apply operations (such as regexes) to text that is natively in UTF-8, giving it a distinct advantage over ICU, which was written back when UTF-16 seemed like a good idea and has to convert everything into UTF-16.

fantasticfears• 10 years ago

It's hard but needed to differentiate between UTF-16 and UChar byte array. UChar byte array are not essentially an well-formed UTF-16 string. Beyond, why bother use UnicodeString? It's fairly easy to use. It covers the detail from your sight.

It's indeed super cool to see a modern Unicode C++ library. But anyway, is it really useful for production usage? The answer could be no. In contrast, ICU was old, battle-tested, compact and well-tested.

nly2• 10 years ago

Looks like unicorn is just using PCRE for regex to me.

weinzierl• 10 years ago

Comparison with ICU would be interesting but probably unfair given size and age of ICU. Personally I'd like to see it compared to utf8rewind (previously discussed on HN [1]).

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10029979

cmrdporcupine2• 10 years ago

The unicode portion looks reasonable, but why is it necessary for it to include its own flags, file io, file management, and environment classes?

Why is it so many C++ libraries fall into this habit of trying to build one big framework. I'm perfectly happy with gflags -- a unicode library would be nice for my project, but now I won't consider this library.

captaincrowbar3• 10 years ago

Because the whole point is to handle anything that needs Unicode support. A library that only manipulated Unicode strings would be incomplete if you still couldn't use Unicode in command line options, file names, etc.

cmrdporcupine2• 10 years ago

I would recommend breaking them off into separate additional libraries. I don't need unicode for flags, so paying for it at compile and link time seems unwise. Or provide adapter classes that can be used over other frameworks. Just a suggestion.

nly2• 10 years ago

That's what will happen until there's a defacto/standard library for this stuff. Languages like Python and Go have a wider base in the standard library. C++14 still only gives you platform dependent 'wide' strings, UTF-8 string literals, and UTF-8 conversion... which makes things awkward.

vidoc• 10 years ago

Seems like the word 'Unicorn' is currently the buzzword of 2016 in tech!

Unicorn: C++ Unicode string library

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