[Insight-users] Using ITK with unicode character set

[Sean McBride]

On 7/3/07 9:55 AM, Nithiananthan, Sajendra said:

>> >I assume that because char type is too small to hold Unicode 
>> encoding so I
>> >need to use wchar_t.
>> 
>> This assumption is incorrect.  I really suggest you read:
>> <http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html>
>> 
>> char* is perfectly fine for a unicode string that is encoded as UTF8.
>> 
>> 
>> After reading the above article, the question you should ask (and I
>> don't know the answer) is "What encoding does ITK's 
>> SetFileName() expect?".
>> 
>
>char * might be perfectly fine for UTF8, but you can't guarantee that the
>Windows File System will understand UTF-8.  Windows likes to use wide
>characters for filenames (at least on some systems I've seen) so you have to
>account for that.

That's fine.  But you are perhaps missing my point.  ITK exposes its own
APIs.  It has an API named SetFileName() that takes a char*.  As users
of the API, we need to know what encoding it expects.  We'd still need
to know even if the parameter was wchar_t, void*, or anything else.  The
implementators of the API may have to conditionally convert from that
encoding to whatever encoding a particular OS's file system APIs
desire.  That's fine too, but it's also an implementation detail that
users of the API should not care about.

The question remains: What encoding does ITK's SetFileName() expect?

-- 
____________________________________________________________
Sean McBride, B. Eng                 sean at rogue-research.com
Rogue Research                        www.rogue-research.com 
Mac Software Developer              Montréal, Québec, Canada