utfcpp

> I've always tried as much as possible to treat strings as just opaque data and never look into them, which tends to work well, but in some domains you really need to look at and massage the characters/codepoints/grapheme clusters, and the lack of a first-citizen UTF-8-aware string type is, I think, a bit unfortunate in this day and age. You don't need a string type for that, you just need routines that handle UTF-8 strings, like utfcpp (https://github.com/nemtrif/utfcpp).

Why are the examples for ztd.text writing UTF-16 to std::cout? Won't this fail on Linux where UTF-16 is rarely used and terminals typically default to UTF-8? Personally I've enjoyed using the tiny-weeny header only utfcpp[0] for simple manipulation of UTF-8 and unicode-to-unicode conversions, and typically use Boost.Locale[1] when I need to do I/O. 95% of localization problems have almost nothing to do with encoding. Encodings are boring. It's like arguing over JSON vs YAML. To do I/O properly across platforms you may need wrappers for the standard output streams that will handle conversion for you, sure, but... you also need to handle date, time and currency formatting/parsing, message formatting, and to enable translations. See [2] regarding Windows: > All of the examples that come with Boost.Locale are designed for UTF-8 and it is the