C++ iterate or split UTF-8 string into array of symbols?

Question

Searching for a platform- and 3rd-party-library- independent way of iterating UTF-8 string or splitting it into array of UTF-8 symbols.

Please post a code snippet.

Solved: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2852895/c-iterate-or-split-utf-8-string-into-array-of-symbols#2856241

Answer 1

Try ICU Library.

Answer 2

If I understand correctly, it sounds like you want to find the start of each UTF-8 character. If so, then it would be fairly straightforward to parse them (interpreting them is a different matter). But the definition of how many octets are involved is well-defined by the RFC:

Char. number range  |        UTF-8 octet sequence
   (hexadecimal)    |              (binary)
--------------------+---------------------------------------------
0000 0000-0000 007F | 0xxxxxxx
0000 0080-0000 07FF | 110xxxxx 10xxxxxx
0000 0800-0000 FFFF | 1110xxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx
0001 0000-0010 FFFF | 11110xxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx 10xxxxxx

For example, if lb has the first octet of a UTF-8 character, I think the following would determine the number of octets involved.

unsigned char lb;

if (( lb & 0x80 ) == 0 )          // lead bit is zero, must be a single ascii
   printf( "1 octet\n" );
else if (( lb & 0xE0 ) == 0xC0 )  // 110x xxxx
   printf( "2 octets\n" );
else if (( lb & 0xF0 ) == 0xE0 ) // 1110 xxxx
   printf( "3 octets\n" );
else if (( lb & 0xF8 ) == 0xF0 ) // 1111 0xxx
   printf( "4 octets\n" );
else
   printf( "Unrecognized lead byte (%02x)\n", lb );

Ultimately, though, you are going to be much better off using an existing library as suggested in another post. The above code might categorize the characters according to octets, but it doesn't help "do" anything with them once that is finished.

Answer 3

Off the cuff:

// Return length of s converted. On success return should equal s.length().
// On error return points to the character where decoding failed.
// Remember to check the success flag since decoding errors could occur at
// the end of the string
int convert(std::vector<int>& u, const std::string& s, bool& success) {
    success = false;
    int cp = 0;
    int runlen = 0;
    for (std::string::const_iterator it = s.begin(), end = s.end(); it != end; ++it) {
        int ch = static_cast<unsigned char>(*it);
        if (runlen > 0) {
            if ((ch & 0xc0 != 0x80) || cp == 0) return it-s.begin();
            cp = (cp << 6) + (ch & 0x3f);
            if (--runlen == 0) {
                u.push_back(cp);
                cp = 0;
            }
        }
        else if (cp == 0) {
            if (ch < 0x80)      { u.push_back(ch); }
            else if (ch > 0xf8) return it-s.begin();
            else if (ch > 0xf0) { cp = ch & 7; runlen = 3; }
            else if (ch > 0xe0) { cp = ch & 0xf; runlen = 2; }
            else if (ch > 0xc0) { cp = ch & 0x1f; runlen = 1; }
            else return it-s.begin(); // stop on error
        }
        else return it-s.begin();
    }
    success = runlen == 0; // verify we are between codepoints
    return s.length();
}

Answer 4

UTF8 CPP is exactly what you want

Answer 5

Solved using tiny platform-independent UTF8 CPP library:

    char* str = (char*)text.c_str();    // utf-8 string
    char* str_i = str;                  // string iterator
    char* end = str+strlen(str)+1;      // end iterator

    unsigned char[5] symbol = {0,0,0,0,0};

    do
    {
        uint32_t code = utf8::next(str_i, end); // get 32 bit code of a utf-8 symbol
        if (code == 0)
            continue;

        utf8::append(code, symbol); // initialize array `symbol`
    }
    while ( str_i < end );