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// Copyright (C) 2016 The Qt Company Ltd.
// SPDX-License-Identifier: LicenseRef-Qt-Commercial OR GFDL-1.3-no-invariants-only
/*!
\page unicode.html
\title Unicode in Qt
\brief Information about support for Unicode in Qt.
\keyword Unicode
is the standard for encoding text in almost all languages
spoken in the world. It is nowadays used as the native encoding
for text on most modern operating systems. The major exception is
Microsoft Windows that still has a dual system supporting code pages
and Unicode for applications.
\section1 Qt's Classes for Working with Strings
These classes are relevant when working with string data. For information
about rendering text, see the \l{Rich Text Processing} overview, and if
your string data is in XML, see the \l{XML Processing} overview.
\annotatedlist string-processing
\section1 Information about Unicode on the Web
of documents available, including
\list
technical introduction to Unicode}
home page for the standard}
\endlist
\section1 Unicode in Qt
In Qt, and in most applications that use Qt, most or all user-visible
strings are stored using Unicode. Qt provides:
\list
\li Translation to/from legacy encoding for file I/O: see
QTextCodec and QTextStream.
\li Support for locale specific Input Methods and keyboards.
\li A string class, QString, that stores Unicode characters, with
support for migrating from C strings including fast
translation to and from UTF-8, ISO8859-1 and US-ASCII, and all the
usual string operations.
\li Unicode-aware UI controls.
\li Unicode compliant text segmentation (QTextBoundaryFinder)
\li Unicode compliant line breaking and text rendering
\endlist
To fully benefit from Unicode, we recommend using QString for storing
all user-visible strings, and performing all text file I/O using
QTextStream.
All the function arguments in Qt that may be user-visible strings,
QLabel::setText() and a many others, take \c{const QString &}s.
QString provides implicit casting from \c{const char *}
so that things like
\snippet snippets/code/doc_src_unicode.cpp 0
will work. There is also a function, QObject::tr(), that provides
translation support, like this:
\snippet snippets/code/doc_src_unicode.cpp 1
QObject::tr() maps from \c{const char *} to a Unicode string, and
uses installable QTranslator objects to do the mapping.
Qt provides a number of built-in QTextCodec classes, that is,
classes that know how to translate between Unicode and legacy
encodings to support programs that must talk to other programs or
read/write files in legacy file formats.
Conversion to/from \c{const char *} uses a UTF-8.
However, applications can easily find codecs
for other locales, and set any open file or network connection to use
a special codec.
Since US-ASCII and ISO-8859-1 are so common, there are also especially
fast functions for mapping to and from them. For example, to open an
application's icon one might do this:
\snippet snippets/code/doc_src_unicode.cpp 2
or
\snippet snippets/code/doc_src_unicode.cpp 3
Qt supports rendering text in most languages written in the world. The detailed
list of supported writing systems depends a bit on operating system support and
font availability on the target system.
\sa {Internationalization with Qt}
*/