[Gdal-dev] RFC DRAFT: Unicode support in GDAL

[Andrey Kiselev]

On Mon, Sep 25, 2006 at 06:45:13PM -0400, Frank Warmerdam wrote:
> >   From my painfull practice as well from the knowledge of other 
> >libraries and some standards comes the following rule of thumb: *use 
> >wide chars* and do not make *implicite* assumptions about encoding (here 
> >UTF8). This means that:
> >- GDAL should be extended with overloaded, i18n aware and wchar driven 
> >methods/interfaces .
> >- GDAL drivers should make all necessary conversion from and to wchars.
> >
> >I know that this proposition is really expensive in working hours and is 
> >not the shortest path to i18n compliant GDAL. But I also know that such 
> >attempt will:
> >- simplify GDAL interfaces and make them *explicite *with respect to i18n.
> >- enable smooth transition for existing applications.
> >- avoid yet another copy of strings, because many libraries already 
> >provides wchar driven interfaces.
> 
> Can you provide some more background on why a wide character solution
> is preferable to UTF8?

I am seconded on this. For me it looks like 8-bit UTF-8 is the same as
wide chars in terms of multilingual support. Wide chars typically used
in Windows interfaces and we can implement necessary conversion
functions where it is needed. Most free toolkits and libraries use
UTF-8 internally and it is no problem to interface with them using our
approach.

Regards,
Andrey


-- 
Andrey V. Kiselev
ICQ# 26871517