The C++ Standard Library: A Tutorial and Reference

Chapter 14. Internationalization

As the global market has increased in importance, so has internationalization (or i18n for short)^[1] become more important for software development. As a consequence, the C++ standard library provides concepts to write code for international programs. These concepts influence mainly the use of I/O and string processing. This chapter describes these concepts. Many thanks to Dietmar Kühl, who is an expert on I/O and internationalization in the C++ standard library and wrote major parts of this chapter.

The C++ standard library provides a general approach to support national conventions without being bound to specific conventions. This goes to the extent, for example, that strings are not bound to a specific character ...