/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
-// Name: unicode
+// Name: unicode.h
// Purpose: topic overview
// Author: wxWidgets team
// RCS-ID: $Id$
// Licence: wxWindows license
/////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
-/*!
-
- @page unicode_overview Unicode support in wxWidgets
-
- This section briefly describes the state of the Unicode support in wxWidgets.
- Read it if you want to know more about how to write programs able to work with
- characters from languages other than English.
- @ref whatisunicode_overview
- @ref unicodeandansi_overview
- @ref unicodeinsidewxw_overview
- @ref unicodeoutsidewxw_overview
- @ref unicodesettings_overview
- @ref topic8_overview
-
-
- @section whatisunicode What is Unicode?
-
- wxWidgets has support for compiling in Unicode mode
- on the platforms which support it. Unicode is a standard for character
- encoding which addresses the shortcomings of the previous, 8 bit standards, by
- using at least 16 (and possibly 32) bits for encoding each character. This
- allows to have at least 65536 characters (what is called the BMP, or basic
- multilingual plane) and possible 2^32 of them instead of the usual 256 and
- is sufficient to encode all of the world languages at once. More details about
- Unicode may be found at #http://www.unicode.org.
- As this solution is obviously preferable to the previous ones (think of
- incompatible encodings for the same language, locale chaos and so on), many
- modern operating systems support it. The probably first example is Windows NT
- which uses only Unicode internally since its very first version.
- Writing internationalized programs is much easier with Unicode and, as the
- support for it improves, it should become more and more so. Moreover, in the
- Windows NT/2000 case, even the program which uses only standard ASCII can profit
- from using Unicode because they will work more efficiently - there will be no
- need for the system to convert all strings the program uses to/from Unicode
- each time a system call is made.
-
- @section unicodeandansi Unicode and ANSI modes
-
- As not all platforms supported by wxWidgets support Unicode (fully) yet, in
- many cases it is unwise to write a program which can only work in Unicode
- environment. A better solution is to write programs in such way that they may
- be compiled either in ANSI (traditional) mode or in the Unicode one.
- This can be achieved quite simply by using the means provided by wxWidgets.
- Basically, there are only a few things to watch out for:
-
-
- Character type (@c char or @c wchar_t)
- Literal strings (i.e. @c "Hello, world!" or @c '*')
- String functions (@c strlen(), @c strcpy(), ...)
- Special preprocessor tokens (@c __FILE__, @c __DATE__
- and @c __TIME__)
-
-
- Let's look at them in order. First of all, each character in an Unicode
- program takes 2 bytes instead of usual one, so another type should be used to
- store the characters (@c char only holds 1 byte usually). This type is
- called @c wchar_t which stands for @e wide-character type.
- Also, the string and character constants should be encoded using wide
- characters (@c wchar_t type) which typically take 2 or 4 bytes instead
- of @c char which only takes one. This is achieved by using the standard C
- (and C++) way: just put the letter @c 'L' after any string constant and it
- becomes a @e long constant, i.e. a wide character one. To make things a bit
- more readable, you are also allowed to prefix the constant with @c 'L'
- instead of putting it after it.
- Of course, the usual standard C functions don't work with @c wchar_t
- strings, so another set of functions exists which do the same thing but accept
- @c wchar_t * instead of @c char *. For example, a function to get the
- length of a wide-character string is called @c wcslen() (compare with
- @c strlen() - you see that the only difference is that the "str" prefix
- standing for "string" has been replaced with "wcs" standing for "wide-character
- string").
- And finally, the standard preprocessor tokens enumerated above expand to ANSI
- strings but it is more likely that Unicode strings are wanted in the Unicode
- build. wxWidgets provides the macros @c __TFILE__, @c __TDATE__
- and @c __TTIME__ which behave exactly as the standard ones except that
- they produce ANSI strings in ANSI build and Unicode ones in the Unicode build.
- To summarize, here is a brief example of how a program which can be compiled
- in both ANSI and Unicode modes could look like:
-
- @code
- #ifdef __UNICODE__
- wchar_t wch = L'*';
- const wchar_t *ws = L"Hello, world!";
- int len = wcslen(ws);
-
- wprintf(L"Compiled at %s\n", __TDATE__);
- #else // ANSI
- char ch = '*';
- const char *s = "Hello, world!";
- int len = strlen(s);
-
- printf("Compiled at %s\n", __DATE__);
- #endif // Unicode/ANSI
- @endcode
-
- Of course, it would be nearly impossibly to write such programs if it had to
- be done this way (try to imagine the number of @c #ifdef UNICODE an average
- program would have had!). Luckily, there is another way - see the next
- section.
-
- @section unicodeinsidewxw Unicode support in wxWidgets
-
- In wxWidgets, the code fragment from above should be written instead:
-
- @code
- wxChar ch = wxT('*');
- wxString s = wxT("Hello, world!");
- int len = s.Len();
- @endcode
-
- What happens here? First of all, you see that there are no more @c #ifdefs
- at all. Instead, we define some types and macros which behave differently in
- the Unicode and ANSI builds and allow us to avoid using conditional
- compilation in the program itself.
- We have a @c wxChar type which maps either on @c char or @c wchar_t
- depending on the mode in which program is being compiled. There is no need for
- a separate type for strings though, because the standard
- #wxString supports Unicode, i.e. it stores either ANSI or
- Unicode strings depending on the compile mode.
- Finally, there is a special #wxT() macro which should enclose all
- literal strings in the program. As it is easy to see comparing the last
- fragment with the one above, this macro expands to nothing in the (usual) ANSI
- mode and prefixes @c 'L' to its argument in the Unicode mode.
- The important conclusion is that if you use @c wxChar instead of
- @c char, avoid using C style strings and use @c wxString instead and
- don't forget to enclose all string literals inside #wxT() macro, your
- program automatically becomes (almost) Unicode compliant!
- Just let us state once again the rules:
-
-
- Always use @c wxChar instead of @c char
- Always enclose literal string constants in #wxT() macro
- unless they're already converted to the right representation (another standard
- wxWidgets macro #_() does it, for example, so there is no
- need for @c wxT() in this case) or you intend to pass the constant directly
- to an external function which doesn't accept wide-character strings.
- Use @c wxString instead of C style strings.
-
-
-
- @section unicodeoutsidewxw Unicode and the outside world
-
- We have seen that it was easy to write Unicode programs using wxWidgets types
- and macros, but it has been also mentioned that it isn't quite enough.
- Although everything works fine inside the program, things can get nasty when
- it tries to communicate with the outside world which, sadly, often expects
- ANSI strings (a notable exception is the entire Win32 API which accepts either
- Unicode or ANSI strings and which thus makes it unnecessary to ever perform
- any conversions in the program). GTK 2.0 only accepts UTF-8 strings.
- To get an ANSI string from a wxString, you may use the
- mb_str() function which always returns an ANSI
- string (independently of the mode - while the usual
- #c_str() returns a pointer to the internal
- representation which is either ASCII or Unicode). More rarely used, but still
- useful, is wc_str() function which always returns
- the Unicode string.
- Sometimes it is also necessary to go from ANSI strings to wxStrings.
- In this case, you can use the converter-constructor, as follows:
-
-
- @code
- const char* ascii_str = "Some text";
- wxString str(ascii_str, wxConvUTF8);
- @endcode
-
- This code also compiles fine under a non-Unicode build of wxWidgets,
- but in that case the converter is ignored.
- For more information about converters and Unicode see
- the @ref mbconvclasses_overview.
-
- @section unicodesettings Unicode-related compilation settings
-
- You should define @c wxUSE_UNICODE to 1 to compile your program in
- Unicode mode. This currently works for wxMSW, wxGTK, wxMac and wxX11. If you
- compile your program in ANSI mode you can still define @c wxUSE_WCHAR_T
- to get some limited support for @c wchar_t type.
- This will allow your program to perform conversions between Unicode strings and
- ANSI ones (using @ref mbconvclasses_overview)
- and construct wxString objects from Unicode strings (presumably read
- from some external file or elsewhere).
-
- @section topic8 Traps for the unwary
-
-
-
- Casting c_str() to void* is now char*, not wxChar*
- Passing c_str(), mb_str() or wc_str() to variadic functions
- doesn't work
-
- */
-
+/**
+
+@page overview_unicode Unicode Support in wxWidgets
+
+This section describes how does wxWidgets support Unicode and how can it affect
+your programs.
+
+Notice that Unicode support has changed radically in wxWidgets 3.0 and a lot of
+existing material pertaining to the previous versions of the library is not
+correct any more. Please see @ref overview_changes_unicode for the details of
+these changes.
+
+You can skip the first two sections if you're already familiar with Unicode and
+wish to jump directly in the details of its support in the library:
+@li @ref overview_unicode_what
+@li @ref overview_unicode_encodings
+@li @ref overview_unicode_supportin
+@li @ref overview_unicode_pitfalls
+@li @ref overview_unicode_supportout
+@li @ref overview_unicode_settings
+
+<hr>
+
+
+@section overview_unicode_what What is Unicode?
+
+Unicode is a standard for character encoding which addresses the shortcomings
+of the previous, 8 bit standards, by using at least 16 (and possibly 32) bits
+for encoding each character. This allows to have at least 65536 characters
+(in what is called the BMP, or basic multilingual plane) and possible 2^32 of
+them instead of the usual 256 and is sufficient to encode all of the world
+languages at once. More details about Unicode may be found at
+http://www.unicode.org/.
+
+From a practical point of view, using Unicode is almost a requirement when
+writing applications for international audience. Moreover, any application
+reading files which it didn't produce or receiving data from the network from
+other services should be ready to deal with Unicode.
+
+
+@section overview_unicode_encodings Unicode Representations
+
+Unicode provides a unique code to identify every character, however in practice
+these codes are not always used directly but encoded using one of the standard
+UTF or Unicode Transformation Formats which are algorithms mapping the Unicode
+codes to byte code sequences. The simplest of them is UTF-32 which simply maps
+the Unicode code to a 4 byte sequence representing this 32 bit number (although
+this is still not completely trivial as the mapping is different for little and
+big-endian architectures). UTF-32 is commonly used under Unix systems for
+internal representation of Unicode strings. Another very widespread standard is
+UTF-16 which is used by Microsoft Windows: it encodes the first (approximately)
+64 thousands of Unicode characters using only 2 bytes and uses a pair of 16-bit
+codes to encode the characters beyond this. Finally, the most widespread
+encoding used for the external Unicode storage (e.g. files and network
+protocols) is UTF-8 which is byte-oriented and so avoids the endianness
+ambiguities of UTF-16 and UTF-32. However UTF-8 uses a variable number of bytes
+for representing Unicode characters which makes it less efficient than UTF-32
+for internal representation.
+
+From the C/C++ programmer perspective the situation is further complicated by
+the fact that the standard type @c wchar_t which is used to represent the
+Unicode ("wide") strings in C/C++ doesn't have the same size on all platforms.
+It is 4 bytes under Unix systems, corresponding to the tradition of using
+UTF-32, but only 2 bytes under Windows which is required by compatibility with
+the OS which uses UTF-16.
+
+
+@section overview_unicode_supportin Unicode Support in wxWidgets
+
+Since wxWidgets 3.0 Unicode support is always enabled and building the library
+without it is not recommended any longer and will cease to be supported in the
+near future. This means that internally only Unicode strings are used and that,
+under Microsoft Windows, Unicode system API is used which means that wxWidgets
+programs require the Microsoft Layer for Unicode to run on Windows 95/98/ME.
+
+However, unlike Unicode build mode in the previous versions of wxWidgets, this
+support is mostly transparent: you can still continue to work with the narrow
+(i.e. @c char*) strings even if wide (i.e. @c wchar_t*) strings are also
+supported. Any wxWidgets function accepts arguments of either type as both
+kinds of strings are implicitly converted to wxString, so both
+@code
+wxMessageBox("Hello, world!");
+@endcode
+and somewhat less usual
+@code
+wxMessageBox(L"Salut \u00e0 toi!"); // 00E0 is "Latin Small Letter a with Grave"
+@endcode
+work as expected.
+
+Notice that the narrow strings used with wxWidgets are @e always assumed to be
+in the current locale encoding, so writing
+@code
+wxMessageBox("Salut à toi!");
+@endcode
+wouldn't work if the encoding used on the user system is incompatible with
+ISO-8859-1 (or even if the sources were compiled under different locale
+in the case of gcc). In particular, the most common encoding used under
+modern Unix systems is UTF-8 and as the string above is not a valid UTF-8 byte
+sequence, nothing would be displayed at all in this case. Thus it is important
+to never use 8 bit characters directly in the program source but use wide
+strings or, alternatively, write
+@code
+wxMessageBox(wxString::FromUTF8("Salut \xc3\xa0 toi!"));
+@endcode
+
+In a similar way, wxString provides access to its contents as either wchar_t or
+char character buffer. Of course, the latter only works if the string contains
+data representable in the current locale encoding. This will always be the case
+if the string had been initially constructed from a narrow string or if it
+contains only 7-bit ASCII data but otherwise this conversion is not guaranteed
+to succeed. And as with @c FromUTF8() example above, you can always use @c
+ToUTF8() to retrieve the string contents in UTF-8 encoding -- this, unlike
+converting to @c char* using the current locale, never fails
+
+To summarize, Unicode support in wxWidgets is mostly transparent for the
+application and if you use wxString objects for storing all the character data
+in your program there is really nothing special to do. However you should be
+aware of the potential problems covered by the following section.
+
+
+@section overview_unicode_pitfalls Potential Unicode Pitfalls
+
+The problems can be separated into three broad classes:
+
+@subsection overview_unicode_compilation_errors Unicode-Related Compilation Errors
+
+Because of the need to support implicit conversions to both @c char and @c
+wchar_t, wxString implementation is rather involved and many of its operators
+don't return the types which they could be naively expected to return. For
+example, the @c operator[] doesn't return neither a @c char nor a @c wchar_t
+but an object of a helper class wxUniChar or wxUniCharRef which is implicitly
+convertible to either. Usually you don't need to worry about this as the
+conversions do their work behind the scenes however in some cases it doesn't
+work. Here are some examples, using a wxString object @c s and some integer @c
+n:
+
+ - Writing @code switch ( s[n] ) @endcode doesn't work because the argument of
+ the switch statement must an integer expression so you need to replace
+ @c s[n] with @code s[n].GetValue() @endcode. You may also force the
+ conversion to char or wchar_t by using an explicit cast but beware that
+ converting the value to char uses the conversion to current locale and may
+ return 0 if it fails. Finally notice that writing @code (wxChar)s[n] @endcode
+ works both with wxWidgets 3.0 and previous library versions and so should be
+ used for writing code which should be compatible with both 2.8 and 3.0.
+
+ - Similarly, @code &s[n] @endcode doesn't yield a pointer to char so you may
+ not pass it to functions expecting @c char* or @c wchar_t*. Consider using
+ string iterators instead if possible or replace this expression with
+ @code s.c_str() + n @endcode otherwise.
+
+Another class of problems is related to the fact that the value returned by @c
+c_str() itself is also not just a pointer to a buffer but a value of helper
+class wxCStrData which is implicitly convertible to both narrow and wide
+strings. Again, this mostly will be unnoticeable but can result in some
+problems:
+
+ - You shouldn't pass @c c_str() result to vararg functions such as standard
+ @c printf(). Some compilers (notably g++) warn about this but even if they
+ don't, this @code printf("Hello, %s", s.c_str()) @endcode is not going to
+ work. It can be corrected in one of the following ways:
+
+ - Preferred: @code wxPrintf("Hello, %s", s) @endcode (notice the absence
+ of @c c_str(), it is not needed at all with wxWidgets functions)
+ - Compatible with wxWidgets 2.8: @code wxPrintf("Hello, %s", s.c_str()) @endcode
+ - Using an explicit conversion to narrow, multibyte, string:
+ @code printf("Hello, %s", (const char *)s.mb_str()) @endcode
+ - Using a cast to force the issue (listed only for completeness):
+ @code printf("Hello, %s", (const char *)s.c_str()) @endcode
+
+ - The result of @c c_str() can not be cast to @c char* but only to @c const @c
+ @c char*. Of course, modifying the string via the pointer returned by this
+ method has never been possible but unfortunately it was occasionally useful
+ to use a @c const_cast here to pass the value to const-incorrect functions.
+ This can be done either using new wxString::char_str() (and matching
+ wchar_str()) method or by writing a double cast:
+ @code (char *)(const char *)s.c_str() @endcode
+
+ - One of the unfortunate consequences of the possibility to pass wxString to
+ @c wxPrintf() without using @c c_str() is that it is now impossible to pass
+ the elements of unnamed enumerations to @c wxPrintf() and other similar
+ vararg functions, i.e.
+ @code
+ enum { Red, Green, Blue };
+ wxPrintf("Red is %d", Red);
+ @endcode
+ doesn't compile. The easiest workaround is to give a name to the enum.
+
+Other unexpected compilation errors may arise but they should happen even more
+rarely than the above-mentioned ones and the solution should usually be quite
+simple: just use the explicit methods of wxUniChar and wxCStrData classes
+instead of relying on their implicit conversions if the compiler can't choose
+among them.
+
+
+@subsection overview_unicode_data_loss Data Loss due To Unicode Conversion Errors
+
+wxString API provides implicit conversion of the internal Unicode string
+contents to narrow, char strings. This can be very convenient and is absolutely
+necessary for backwards compatibility with the existing code using wxWidgets
+however it is a rather dangerous operation as it can easily give unexpected
+results if the string contents isn't convertible to the current locale.
+
+To be precise, the conversion will always succeed if the string was created
+from a narrow string initially. It will also succeed if the current encoding is
+UTF-8 as all Unicode strings are representable in this encoding. However
+initializing the string using FromUTF8() method and then accessing it as a char
+string via its c_str() method is a recipe for disaster as the program may work
+perfectly well during testing on Unix systems using UTF-8 locale but completely
+fail under Windows where UTF-8 locales are never used because c_str() would
+return an empty string.
+
+The simplest way to ensure that this doesn't happen is to avoid conversions to
+@c char* completely by using wxString throughout your program. However if the
+program never manipulates 8 bit strings internally, using @c char* pointers is
+safe as well. So the existing code needs to be reviewed when upgrading to
+wxWidgets 3.0 and the new code should be used with this in mind and ideally
+avoiding implicit conversions to @c char*.
+
+
+@subsection overview_unicode_performance Unicode Performance Implications
+
+Under Unix systems wxString class uses variable-width UTF-8 encoding for
+internal representation and this implies that it can't guarantee constant-time
+access to N-th element of the string any longer as to find the position of this
+character in the string we have to examine all the preceding ones. Usually this
+doesn't matter much because most algorithms used on the strings examine them
+sequentially anyhow and because wxString implements a cache for iterating over
+the string by index but it can have serious consequences for algorithms
+using random access to string elements as they typically acquire O(N^2) time
+complexity instead of O(N) where N is the length of the string.
+
+Even despite caching the index, indexed access should be replaced with
+sequential access using string iterators. For example a typical loop:
+@code
+wxString s("hello");
+for ( size_t i = 0; i < s.length(); i++ )
+{
+ wchar_t ch = s[i];
+
+ // do something with it
+}
+@endcode
+should be rewritten as
+@code
+wxString s("hello");
+for ( wxString::const_iterator i = s.begin(); i != s.end(); ++i )
+{
+ wchar_t ch = *i
+
+ // do something with it
+}
+@endcode
+
+Another, similar, alternative is to use pointer arithmetic:
+@code
+wxString s("hello");
+for ( const wchar_t *p = s.wc_str(); *p; p++ )
+{
+ wchar_t ch = *i
+
+ // do something with it
+}
+@endcode
+however this doesn't work correctly for strings with embedded @c NUL characters
+and the use of iterators is generally preferred as they provide some run-time
+checks (at least in debug build) unlike the raw pointers. But if you do use
+them, it is better to use wchar_t pointers rather than char ones to avoid the
+data loss problems due to conversion as discussed in the previous section.
+
+
+@section overview_unicode_supportout Unicode and the Outside World
+
+Even though wxWidgets always uses Unicode internally, not all the other
+libraries and programs do and even those that do use Unicode may use a
+different encoding of it. So you need to be able to convert the data to various
+representations and the wxString methods ToAscii(), ToUTF8() (or its synonym
+utf8_str()), mb_str(), c_str() and wc_str() can be used for this. The first of
+them should be only used for the string containing 7-bit ASCII characters only,
+anything else will be replaced by some substitution character. mb_str()
+converts the string to the encoding used by the current locale and so can
+return an empty string if the string contains characters not representable in
+it as explained in @ref overview_unicode_data_loss. The same applies to c_str()
+if its result is used as a narrow string. Finally, ToUTF8() and wc_str()
+functions never fail and always return a pointer to char string containing the
+UTF-8 representation of the string or wchar_t string.
+
+wxString also provides two convenience functions: From8BitData() and
+To8BitData(). They can be used to create wxString from arbitrary binary data
+without supposing that it is in current locale encoding, and then get it back,
+again, without any conversion or, rather, undoing the conversion used by
+From8BitData(). Because of this you should only use From8BitData() for the
+strings created using To8BitData(). Also notice that in spite of the
+availability of these functions, wxString is not the ideal class for storing
+arbitrary binary data as they can take up to 4 times more space than needed
+(when using @c wchar_t internal representation on the systems where size of
+wide characters is 4 bytes) and you should consider using wxMemoryBuffer
+instead.
+
+Final word of caution: most of these functions may return either directly the
+pointer to internal string buffer or a temporary wxCharBuffer or wxWCharBuffer
+object. Such objects are implicitly convertible to char and wchar_t pointers,
+respectively, and so the result of, for example, ToUTF8() can always be passed
+directly to a function taking @c const @c char*. However code such as
+@code
+const char *p = s.ToUTF8();
+...
+puts(p); // or call any other function taking const char *
+@endcode
+does @b not work because the temporary buffer returned by ToUTF8() is destroyed
+and @c p is left pointing nowhere. To correct this you may use
+@code
+wxCharBuffer p(s.ToUTF8());
+puts(p);
+@endcode
+which does work but results in an unnecessary copy of string data in the build
+configurations when ToUTF8() returns the pointer to internal string buffer. If
+this inefficiency is important you may write
+@code
+const wxUTF8Buf p(s.ToUTF8());
+puts(p);
+@endcode
+where @c wxUTF8Buf is the type corresponding to the real return type of
+ToUTF8(). Similarly, wxWX2WCbuf can be used for the return type of wc_str().
+But, once again, none of these cryptic types is really needed if you just pass
+the return value of any of the functions mentioned in this section to another
+function directly.
+
+@section overview_unicode_settings Unicode Related Compilation Settings
+
+@c wxUSE_UNICODE is now defined as 1 by default to indicate Unicode support.
+If UTF-8 is used for the internal storage in wxString, @c wxUSE_UNICODE_UTF8 is
+also defined, otherwise @c wxUSE_UNICODE_WCHAR is.
+
+*/
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