Cross platform unicode path handling

Question

I'm using boost::filesystem for cross-platform path manipulation, but this breaks down when calls need to be made down into interfaces I don't control that won't accept UTF-8. For example when using the Windows API, I need to convert to UTF-16, and then call the wide-string version of whatever function I was about to call, and then convert any output back to UTF-8.

While the wpath, and other w* forms of many of the boost::filesystem functions help keep sanity, are there any suggestions for how best to handle this conversion to wide-string forms where needed, while maintaining consistency in my own code?

Answer 1

Well the simplest way would be to make some kind of generic routine that would return string encoded the way you'd want for provided path or a wrapper class around the path.

boost::filesystem::wpath boostPath( L"c:\\some_path" );
MyPathWrapper p( boostPath );
std::wstring sUtf8 = p.file_string_utf8();
std::wstring sUtf16 = p.file_string_utf16();
// or
std::wstring sUtf8 = p.file_string( CP_UTF8 );
// ...

Something like that.