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

[Frank Warmerdam]

Marek Brudka wrote:
> Hi,
> 
>    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.

Marek,

Can you provide some more background on why a wide character solution
is preferable to UTF8?  Personally, I think the whole effort will be a
non-starter if we have to re-engineer everything to use wide characters.
I could be overruled of course.

Best regards,
-- 
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I set the clouds in motion - turn up   | Frank Warmerdam, warmerdam at pobox.com
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