Boost.Nowide

Library for cross-platform, unicode aware programming.

The library provides an implementation of standard C and C++ library functions, such that their inputs are UTF-8 aware on Windows without requiring to use Wide API.

Quickstart

Instead of using the standard library functions use the corresponding member of Boost.Nowide with the same name. On Linux those are aliases for the std ones, but on Windows they accept UTF-8 as input and use the wide API for the underlying functionality.

Examples:

• std::ifstream -> boost::nowide::ifstream
• std::fopen -> boost::nowide::fopen
• std::fclose -> boost::nowide::fclose
• std::getenv -> boost::nowide::getenv
• std::putenv -> boost::nowide::putenv
• std::cout -> boost::nowide::cout

To also convert your input arguments to UTF-8 on Windows use:

int main(int argc, char **argv)
{
    boost::nowide::args _(argc, argv); // Must use an instance!
    ...
}

See the Documentation for details.

Compile

Boost.Nowide fully supports CMake. So you can use add_subdirectory("path-to-boost-nowide-repo") and link your project against the target nowide::nowide.

You can also pre-compile and install Boost.Nowide via the usual workflow:

mkdir build && cd build
cmake .. -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/usr/local
make install

A CMake-Config file will be installed alongside Boost.Nowide so find_package(nowide) does work out-of the box (provided it was installed into a "standard" location or its INSTALL_PREFIX was added to CMAKE_PREFIX_PATH).

Note that only on Windows there is an actual library to be linked. On Linux the target is a simple INTERFACE target with no actual linking done.

Boost.Filesystem integration

Boost.Nowide cleanly integrates with Boost.Filesystem:

• Call boost::nowide::nowide_filesystem() to imbue UTF-8 into Boost.Filesystem (for use by boost::filesystem::path)
• If NOWIDE_USE_FILESYSTEM (in CMake) is set, then boost::nowide::[io]fstream redirect to boost::filesystem::[io]fstream (Linux) or provide overloads accepting a boost::filesystem::path (Windows).

Standalone version

There is also a standalone version that does not require Boost at all. Simply replace boost::nowide::foo by nowide::foo in your using projects.