Convert from Utf-8 to Unicode C++

Convert from UTF-8 to unicode c++

I just wrote some code to do this yesterday...

I'm not saying this is the "perfect" way to do this, but it appears to work for all testcases I've run through it (I wrote both directions for that purpose).

I'll leave it to you to translate "%NN" to an integer value.

#include <iostream>
#include <deque>

std::deque<int> unicode_to_utf8(int charcode)
{
    std::deque<int> d;
    if (charcode < 128)
    {
        d.push_back(charcode);
    }
    else
    {
        int first_bits = 6; 
        const int other_bits = 6;
        int first_val = 0xC0;
        int t = 0;
        while (charcode >= (1 << first_bits))
        {
            {
                t = 128 | (charcode & ((1 << other_bits)-1));
                charcode >>= other_bits;
                first_val |= 1 << (first_bits);
                first_bits--;
            }
            d.push_front(t);
        }
        t = first_val | charcode;
        d.push_front(t);
    }
    return d;
}

int utf8_to_unicode(std::deque<int> &coded)
{
    int charcode = 0;
    int t = coded.front();
    coded.pop_front();
    if (t < 128)
    {
        return t;
    }
    int high_bit_mask = (1 << 6) -1;
    int high_bit_shift = 0;
    int total_bits = 0;
    const int other_bits = 6;
    while((t & 0xC0) == 0xC0)
    {
        t <<= 1;
        t &= 0xff;
        total_bits += 6;
        high_bit_mask >>= 1; 
        high_bit_shift++;
        charcode <<= other_bits;
        charcode |= coded.front() & ((1 << other_bits)-1);
        coded.pop_front();
    } 
    charcode |= ((t >> high_bit_shift) & high_bit_mask) << total_bits;
    return charcode;
}

int main()
{
    int charcode; 

    for(;;)
    {
        std::cout << "Enter unicode value:" << std::endl;
        std::cin >> charcode; 
        auto x = unicode_to_utf8(charcode);
        for(auto c : x)
        {
            std::cout << "\\x" << std::hex << c << " ";
        }
        std::cout << std::endl;
        int c = utf8_to_unicode(x);
        std::cout << "reversed:" << std::dec << c << std::hex << " in hex:" << c << std::endl;
    }
}

How to work with UTF-8 in C++, Conversion from other Encodings to UTF-8

How can I convert "any" (or the most used) character encoding to UTF-8?

ICU (International Components for Unicode) is the solution here. It is generally considered to be the last say in Unicode support. Even Boost.Locale and Boost.Regex use it when it comes to Unicode. See my comment on Dory Zidon's answer as to why I recommend using ICU directly, instead of wrappers (like Boost).

You create a converter for a given encoding...

#include <ucnv.h>

UConverter * converter;
UErrorCode err = U_ZERO_ERROR;
converter = ucnv_open( "8859-1", &err );
if ( U_SUCCESS( error ) )
{
    // ...
    ucnv_close( converter );
}

...and then use the UnicodeString class as appripriate.

I think wchar_t does not work because it is 2 bytes long.

The size of wchar_t is implementation-defined. AFAICR, Windows is 2 byte (UCS-2 / UTF-16, depending on Windows version), Linux is 4 byte (UTF-32). In any case, since the standard doesn't define Unicode semantics for wchar_t, using it is non-portable guesswork. Don't guess, use ICU.

Are there functions like isspace(), isalnum(), strlen(), tolower() for such UTF-8-strings?

Not in their UTF-8 encoding, but you don't use that internally anyway. UTF-8 is good for external representation, but internally UTF-16 or UTF-32 are the better choice. The abovementioned functions do exist for Unicode code points (i.e., UChar32); ref. uchar.h.

Please note: I do not do any output(like std::cout) in C++. Just filtering out the words and send them to the server.

Check BreakIterator.

Edit: I forgot to say, that the program has to be portable: Windows, Linux, ...

In case I haven't said it already, do use ICU, and save yourself tons of trouble. Even if it might seem a bit heavyweight at first glance, it is the best implementation out there, it is extremely portable (using it on Windows, Linux, and AIX myself), and you will use it again and again and again in projects to come, so time invested in learning its API is not wasted.

Standard way in C11 and C++11 to convert UTF-8?

Sounds like you're looking for the std::codecvt type. See the example on that page for usage.

How do I properly use std::string on UTF-8 in C++?

Unicode Glossary

Unicode is a vast and complex topic. I do not wish to wade too deep there, however a quick glossary is necessary:

1. Code Points: Code Points are the basic building blocks of Unicode, a code point is just an integer mapped to a meaning. The integer portion fits into 32 bits (well, 24 bits really), and the meaning can be a letter, a diacritic, a white space, a sign, a smiley, half a flag, ... and it can even be "the next portion reads right to left".
2. Grapheme Clusters: Grapheme Clusters are groups of semantically related Code Points, for example a flag in unicode is represented by associating two Code Points; each of those two, in isolation, has no meaning, but associated together in a Grapheme Cluster they represent a flag. Grapheme Clusters are also used to pair a letter with a diacritic in some scripts.

This is the basic of Unicode. The distinction between Code Point and Grapheme Cluster can be mostly glossed over because for most modern languages each "character" is mapped to a single Code Point (there are dedicated accented forms for commonly used letter+diacritic combinations). Still, if you venture in smileys, flags, etc... then you may have to pay attention to the distinction.

---

UTF Primer

Then, a serie of Unicode Code Points has to be encoded; the common encodings are UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32, the latter two existing in both Little-Endian and Big-Endian forms, for a total of 5 common encodings.

In UTF-X, X is the size in bits of the Code Unit, each Code Point is represented as one or several Code Units, depending on its magnitude:

• UTF-8: 1 to 4 Code Units,
• UTF-16: 1 or 2 Code Units,
• UTF-32: 1 Code Unit.

---

std::string and std::wstring.

1. Do not use std::wstring if you care about portability (wchar_t is only 16 bits on Windows); use std::u32string instead (aka std::basic_string<char32_t>).
2. The in-memory representation (std::string or std::wstring) is independent of the on-disk representation (UTF-8, UTF-16 or UTF-32), so prepare yourself for having to convert at the boundary (reading and writing).
3. While a 32-bits wchar_t ensures that a Code Unit represents a full Code Point, it still does not represent a complete Grapheme Cluster.

If you are only reading or composing strings, you should have no to little issues with std::string or std::wstring.

Troubles start when you start slicing and dicing, then you have to pay attention to (1) Code Point boundaries (in UTF-8 or UTF-16) and (2) Grapheme Clusters boundaries. The former can be handled easily enough on your own, the latter requires using a Unicode aware library.

---

Picking std::string or std::u32string?

If performance is a concern, it is likely that std::string will perform better due to its smaller memory footprint; though heavy use of Chinese may change the deal. As always, profile.

If Grapheme Clusters are not a problem, then std::u32string has the advantage of simplifying things: 1 Code Unit -> 1 Code Point means that you cannot accidentally split Code Points, and all the functions of std::basic_string work out of the box.

If you interface with software taking std::string or char*/char const*, then stick to std::string to avoid back-and-forth conversions. It'll be a pain otherwise.

---

UTF-8 in std::string.

UTF-8 actually works quite well in std::string.

Most operations work out of the box because the UTF-8 encoding is self-synchronizing and backward compatible with ASCII.

Due the way Code Points are encoded, looking for a Code Point cannot accidentally match the middle of another Code Point:

• str.find('\n') works,
• str.find("...") works for matching byte by byte¹,
• str.find_first_of("\r\n") works if searching for ASCII characters.

Similarly, regex should mostly works out of the box. As a sequence of characters ("haha") is just a sequence of bytes ("哈"), basic search patterns should work out of the box.

Be wary, however, of character classes (such as [:alphanum:]), as depending on the regex flavor and implementation it may or may not match Unicode characters.

Similarly, be wary of applying repeaters to non-ASCII "characters", "哈?" may only consider the last byte to be optional; use parentheses to clearly delineate the repeated sequence of bytes in such cases: "(哈)?".

¹ The key concepts to look-up are normalization and collation; this affects all comparison operations. std::string will always compare (and thus sort) byte by byte, without regard for comparison rules specific to a language or a usage. If you need to handle full normalization/collation, you need a complete Unicode library, such as ICU.

Convert ISO-8859-1 strings to UTF-8 in C/C++

If your source encoding will always be ISO-8859-1, this is trivial. Here's a loop:

unsigned char *in, *out;
while (*in)
    if (*in<128) *out++=*in++;
    else *out++=0xc2+(*in>0xbf), *out++=(*in++&0x3f)+0x80;

For safety you need to ensure that the output buffer is twice as large as the input buffer, or else include a size limit and check it in the loop condition.

How to convert UTF-16 to UTF-8 using C++?

As mentioned in the comment, you can see Convert C++ std::string to UTF-16-LE encoded string for the code on how to do the conversion.

But given you assumed you have wstring to hold your Korean string, you avoided the trouble of distinguishing UTF-16-LE and UTF-16-BE and you can readily find the Unicode code point of each Korean character in the string. So your problem boils down to find the UTF-8 representation of any code point. It would not be hard, see page 3 of https://www.rfc-editor.org/rfc/rfc3629 (also Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8).

A sample code is in
Convert Unicode code points to UTF-8 and UTF-32

---

Related Topics