intermediate

CppCon 2014 Unicode in C++--James McNellis

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While we wait for this year’s event, we’re featuring videos of some of the 100+ talks from CppCon 2014 for you to enjoy. Here is today’s feature:

Unicode in C++

by James McNellis

(watch on YouTube) (watch on Channel 9)

Summary of the talk:

In some programming languages, text processing is easy. Unfortunately, C++ is not one of those languages. C++ lacks good, built-in support for Unicode, though the situation is starting to improve.

This session will begin with a brief overview of text encodings, and an introduction to Unicode and the various Unicode encodings. We'll look at the woeful state of Unicode support in C++98 (or, really, lack thereof), then take a look at the improvements that were made in C++11 and other improvements that have recently been proposed for standardization. We'll finish up with a discussion of several libraries designed to make it easier to work with Unicode in C++, including the widely-used, open-source International Components for Unicode (ICU) library.

A third way to use boost::serialization

The 10th installment in my series about writing applications with Qt and boost:

A third way to use boost::serialization

by Jens Weller

From the article:

The 10th part of my series about writing applications with Qt and boost is about using boost::serialization. The last part was about how to create the basic structure for a project with boost::filesystem, and how to use boost::filesystem to index folders. But there is a lot of data that just isn't able to be represented as single files, how to store it?

Originally I planned to use a database, as I already have some code handling the SQL queries nicely for me and most of my other applications currently also use this to store their data. Thats why most of my classes from the first day on had an id field, just to enable them to refer to an instance stored in a database. But then, if I could get around using a database, by simply just storing my data in a file, things would be easier, and my code wouldn't need to be scattered with SQL queries. If I couldn't find a reasonable approach, I still could opt for a database anyways.

Handling files in C++ - using boost::filesystem

The 9th installment of my series on writing applications in C++ using Qt and boost:

Handling files - using boost::filesystem

by Jens Weller

From the article:

As part of my data is actual files (images, css, js, files...), I realized that the best way to handle those, would be to just store and load them from the file system. In the UI Qt even offers good support for displaying a folder in an Application with QFileSystemModel. But in the application...