Professional C++, 4th Edition

19String Localization and Regular Expressions

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• How to localize your applications to reach a worldwide audience
• How to use regular expressions to do powerful pattern matching

WROX.COM DOWNLOADS FOR THIS CHAPTER

Please note that all the code examples for this chapter are available as a part of this chapter’s code download on the book’s website at www.wrox.com/go/proc++4e on the Download Code tab.

This chapter starts with a discussion of localization, which allows you to write software that can be localized to different regions around the world.

The second part of this chapter introduces the regular expressions library, which makes it easy to perform pattern matching on strings. It allows you to search for substrings matching a given pattern, but also to validate, parse, and transform strings. Regular expressions are really powerful, and it’s recommended that you start using them instead of manually writing your own string processing code.

LOCALIZATION

When you’re learning how to program in C or C++, it’s useful to think of a character as equivalent to a byte and to treat all characters as members of the ASCII (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) character set. ASCII is a 7-bit set usually stored in an 8-bit char type. In reality, experienced C++ programmers recognize that successful programs are used throughout the world. Even if you don’t initially write your program with international audiences in mind, you shouldn’t prevent ...