Re: locales and encodings on Windows

[Andreas Pflug <pgadmin(at)pse-consulting(dot)de>]

Magnus Hagander wrote:
> The implementation is not buggy.
> The implementation of strcoll() etc *does not exist* for UTF-8.
> There is a perfectly working Unicode system on Windows - it has been
> there since Windows NT 3.1. *Every* API in Windows is unicode
> internally. With Unicode in this case, MS means UTF-16. 
> How do other programs do? They convert their strings to UTF-16 and use
> the unicode functions in the OS. UTF8 support only exists in the two
> functinos used to convert to/from UTF-16.

In general I agree. Most programs won't use UTF-8 at all, but will work 
with wchar_t (i.e. UTF-16 or UTF-32) since coding is easier, and will 
convert to UTF-8 on interfaces only. Additionally, storing UTF-8 seems 
uncommon to me too; this is usually done using NVARCHAR.


> That's at least how I understand it. I'm not a locale/encoding expert
> though, so I could be wrong :)
>
> Perhaps an emulation layer could be written for port/win32. I can't
> really say, because I don't know these things well enough (on any
> platform).

Shouldn't be too complicated.

Regards,
Andreas