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

[Frank Warmerdam]

Andrey Kiselev wrote:
> On 9/21/06, Ben Discoe <ben at vterrain.org> wrote:
>> I am happy to do this work and submit it, i am just waiting to hear 
>> from you
>> (or Frank, or..? Confused by GDAL's new democracy) that i should proceed.
> 
> We have discussed the issue today on IRC and now I want to come up with the
> following proposal.
> 
> Unicode support in GDAL.
> 
> There are three basic statements:
> 
> 1. Users work in localized environment using their native languages. That
>   means we can not assume ASCII character set when working with string data
>   passed to GDAL.

Andrey,

This seems reasonable.

> 2. GDAL uses UTF-8 encoding internally when working with strings.

This seems like a good idea.

> 3. GDAL uses Unicode version of third-party API when it is possible.

I'm not so sure about this, but clearly we don't want to dumb down to ascii
when going to third party apis if it is avoidable.

A couple notes:

  1) I think we should be extending the CPLString class methods to going
     between the various representation and try to use those in preference
     to C functions.  Mainly I suggest this to reduce the amount of keeping
     track of pointers and freeing we would have to do.  We might still want
     the C function interface for some purposes.

  2) Who would be doing this work?

BTW, to prepare it as a formal RFC just write it up as a DOX file in the
gdal/rfc directory and add to the list in rfc_list.dox.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
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and watch the world go round - Rush    | President OSGeo, http://osgeo.org