Re: Portable way to accept unicode keyboard input

[Thomas Dickey]

On Fri, 25 Feb 2011, Sam Varshavchik wrote:

> On Linux, and probably most modern platforms, when I look at what's in 
> wchar_t, I see unicode values. Or, more precisely, UCS-4 in the native byte 
> order. However, elsewhere I've been led to believe that this is really 
> implementation defined; an implementation might put something else for a 
> wchar_t.

I see occasional comments, which suggest that it's not the case for 
Solaris, for instance.

> So I'm reading my wchar_ts from get_wch(), and my application uses unicode to 
> throw text strings around. If wchar_t is not guaranteed to be UCS-4, then I'm 
> trying to figure out what's the most portable way to convert keyboard input 
> to unicode.
>
> The first thing that came to mind was use wcrtomb() to convert wchar_ts to a 
> multibyte sequence, then stack iconv() on top of that, and end up with UCS-4 
> values that way. But if I need to do that, shouldn't I just be able to read 
> the same multibyte sequence with getch(), instead?

That's essentially what get_wch() is doing.

--
Thomas E. Dickey
http://invisible-island.net
ftp://invisible-island.net