How Robust is C 11's Unicode Support, and What Are the Workarounds?

Unicode Support in C 11: An In-Depth Analysis

Introduction

C 11 aims to enhance Unicode support, but delve into the C standard library's implementation to uncover its strengths and limitations.

Strengths and Weaknesses

The C standard library provides inadequate support for Unicode, particularly in areas beyond simple string storage and manipulation. While std::string excels at handling sequences of characters, it lacks Unicode-specific features.

Issues with Character Handling and Text Manipulation

The standard library's "char-like objects" and "characters" approach falls short for Unicode support. Functions like isspace, isprint, and iscntrl are incapable of properly classifying Unicode characters. Text segmentation algorithms and normalization features, essential for Unicode text handling, are also absent.

Conversion Issues

The code conversion facets for converting between different encodings have some useful features, but suffer from deficiencies. The focus on UCS-2 encodings, despite their outdated nature, and the absence of certain essential conversions like UTF-16-bytes to UTF-8 are notable concerns.

Input/Output Stream Interactions

Unicode support in the I/O library is limited to using wstring_convert and wbuffer_convert facilities for reading and writing text in Unicode encodings. This coverage is somewhat restricted.

Regular Expressions and Unicode

C regexes lack level 1 Unicode support, which makes them inadequate for handling complex Unicode text.

Workarounds and Alternative Solutions

To address the shortcomings of the standard library, consider utilizing third-party libraries like ICU and Boost.Locale, which offer comprehensive Unicode support.

Conclusion

While the C standard library provides basic Unicode support, it falls short of providing the comprehensive and robust features needed for efficient and accurate handling of Unicode text. Developers should be aware of these limitations and explore alternative solutions to fully harness Unicode's capabilities in their applications.

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