c++ - How can I embed unicode string constants in a source file?

Question

I'm writing some unit tests which are going to verify our handling of various resources that use other character sets apart from the normal latin alphabet: Cyrilic, Hebrew etc.

The problem I have is that I cannot find a way to embed the expectations in the test source file: here's an example of what I'm trying to do...

///
/// Protected: TestGetHebrewConfigString
///  
void CPrIniFileReaderTest::TestGetHebrewConfigString()
{
    prwstring strHebrewTestFilePath = GetTestFilePath( strHebrewTestFileName );
    CPrIniFileReader prIniListReader( strHebrewTestFilePath.c_str() );
    prIniListReader.SetCurrentSection( strHebrewSubSection );   

    CPPUNIT_ASSERT( prIniListReader.GetConfigString( L"?????????" ) == L"????????") );
}

This quite simply doesnt work. Previously I worked around this using a macro which calls a routine to transform a narrow string to a wide string (we use towstring all over the place in our applications so it's existing code)

#define UNICODE_CONSTANT( CONSTANT ) towstring( CONSTANT )

wstring towstring( LPCSTR lpszValue )
{
    wostringstream os;
    os << lpszValue;
    return os.str();
}

The assertion in the test above then became:

CPPUNIT_ASSERT( prIniListReader.GetConfigString( UNICODE_CONSTANT( "?????????" ) ) == UNICODE_CONSTANT( "????????" ) );

This worked OK on OS X but now I'm porting to linux and I'm finding that the tests are all failing: it all feels rather hackish as well. Can anyone tell me if they have a nicer solution to this problem?

Answer 1

A tedious but portable way is to build your strings using numeric escape codes. For example:

wchar_t *string = L"?????????";

becomes:

wchar_t *string = "x05d3x05d5x05e0x05d3x05d0x05e8x05dfx05dex05e2";

You have to convert all your Unicode characters to numeric escapes. That way your source code becomes encoding-independent.

You can use online tools for conversion, such as this one. It outputs the JavaScript escape format uXXXX, so just search & replace u with x to get the C format.