Support UTF-8 in String? (->GNU/gettext)

[christoph]

This may be out of the scope of SFML, but man oh man it would be sweet,
SFML should provide a way to do toUpper() and toLowwer() type functions for at least English language strings in the sf::string class.

Just because new programmers (hell even older programmers like my self) find ti frustrating to do this in C++

boost has an decent implementation of this for std::string it their stringutils if you are interested

[T.T.H.]

...and I totally forgot point 5:

5) if you intend to seriously work with Unicode and UTF-8 and UTF-16 in your next C++ or Java application then probably your best choice is to use the ICU library from IBM ( http://www.icu-project.org/ ) which is open source, feature rich, mature and -probably most important- considered to be working correctly. Yes, it's a huge monster of a library, but if you want to create a truly international application you need such a monster of a huge library.

(ever asked yourself what a invisible, zero width, text direction changing character will do to your text render engine? ever asked yourself how selecting text with the mouse will work in a text editor being able to seamlessy mix left-to-right and right-to-left text? ever asked yourself how to compare two visibly totally identical strings which contain several, different control characters? No? Oh, what a pitty, but welcome to the wonderful world of Unicode...)


P.S.: have fun selecting the text below (it's from a Arabic news site, probably something about soccer):

English left to right text here ديفيد فيا يسطع في سماء يورو 2008 وصدمة لليونان في بداية رحلة الدفاع عن again some left to right text