Writting Unicode Characters to an OStream

Question

I'm working with unicode/wide characters and I'm trying to create a toString method (Java ::toString equiv). Will ostream handle wide characters, if so is there a way to warn the consumer of the stream that it is unicode coming out of it?

Answer 1

Neither ostream nor the rest of C++ know anything about Unicode. Usually you write a string conversion in C++ as follows:

template<typename Char, typename Traits>
std::basic_ostream<Char, Traits>&
operator<<(std::basic_ostream<Char, Traits>& stream, const YourType& object) {
    return stream << object.a << object.b;  // or whatever
}

Whether you get something Unicode-like is up to the implementation. Streams in C++ are never text streams in the sense of Java, and C++'s strings are not strings in the sense of Java. If you want a real Unicode string, you might want to have a look at the ICU library.