ICU Guide for C++

Docs

• ICU User Guide
• List of available character sets (codepages)
• Faqs

Converter Life Cycle

https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/conversion/converters.html#converter-life-cycle

1. First, open up the converter with a specified name (or alias name).
2. Convert the data
3. Clean up (close) the converter.

Creating a converter

https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/conversion/converters.html#creating-a-converter

You can create a converter 4 different ways, but the first two seem to be the best option for us:

1. By name
2. By codepage number

By name

UConverter *conv = ucnv_open("shift_jis", &myError);

The list of available names can be found here.

By codepage number

ucnv_openCCSID(37, UCNV_IBM, &myErr);

Conversion Methods

https://unicode-org.github.io/icu/userguide/conversion/converters.html#modes-of-conversion

The appropriate conversion methods are ucnv_fromUChars and ucnv_toUChars.

Converting From UTF

len = ucnv_fromUChars(conv, target, targetLen, source, sourceLen, &status);

Converting to UTF

len = ucnv_toUChars(conv, target, targetSize, source, sourceLen, &status);

Closing the converter

To close the converter, you can do:

ucnv_close(conv);

Notes

After reading through the docs, I believe we must first convert the Ascii data to UTF-16 first, then convert it to UTF-8.

Since ICU uses Unicode (UTF-16) internally, all converters convert between UTF-16 (with the endianness according to the current platform) and another encoding.

Also,

In order to use the collation, text boundary analysis, formatting or other ICU APIs, you must use Unicode strings. In order to get Unicode strings from your native > codepage, you can use the conversion API.

This might be the solution:

UConverter *conv;                             // icu converter
const char *source;                           // ascii data array
int32_t sourceSize = sizeof(source);          // size of ascii array data
UErrorCode status = U_ZERO_ERROR;             // error flag
UChar *targetUnicode;                         // icu utf-16 array
char *targetUtf8;                             // array holding the utf-8 data
int32_t targetSize = sizeof(targetUnicode);   // size of the utf-16 array

// Create a converter to handle ascii to unicode
conv = ucnv_open("US-ASCII", &status);

// Convert the ascii to utf-16
ucnv_toUChars(conv, targetUnicode, targetSize, source, sourceSize, &status);

// Set the converter to convert to utf-8 data
conv = ucnv_open("utf-8", &status);

// Convert the utf-16 to utf-8
ucnv_fromUChars(conv, targetUtf8, sizeof(targetUtf8), targetUnicode, targetSize, &status);

// Close the converter
ucnv_close(conv);

Examples

https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/blob/master/icu4c/source/samples/ucnv/convsamp.cpp