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Chapter 27. Internationalization and Localization | 
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Chapter 27. Internationalization and Localization |
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A properly internationalized application will not make assumptions about the
number of bytes in a character. That means that you shouldn't use pointer
arithmetic to step through the characters in a string, and it means you
shouldn't use std::string or standard C functions such
as strlen() because they make the same assumption.
However, you probably already avoid bare char* arrays and pointer arithmetic by
using std::string, so you just need to start using
Glib::ustring instead. See the Basics chapter about
Glib::ustring.
Unfortunately, the integration with the standard iostreams is not completely
foolproof. gtkmm converts Glib::ustrings to a
locale-specific encoding (which usually is not UTF-8) if you output them to an
ostream with operator<<.
Likewise, retrieving Glib::ustrings from
istream with operator>>
causes a conversion in the opposite direction. But this scheme breaks down if
you go through a std::string, e.g. by inputting text
from a stream to a std::string and then implicitly
converting it to a Glib::ustring. If the string
contained non-ASCII characters and the current locale is not UTF-8 encoded, the
result is a corrupted Glib::ustring. You can work around
this with a manual conversion. For instance, to retrieve the
std::string from a ostringstream:
std::ostringstream output;
output.imbue(std::locale("")); // use the user's locale for this stream
output << percentage << " % done";
label->set_text(Glib::locale_to_utf8(output.str()));
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| Marking strings for translation |  |
Pitfalls |