ansak-string

Copyright 2015, 2021 Arthur N. Klassen; see LICENSE for usage guidelines (BSD 2-clause)

This library started as the first piece of a larger project. It's a simple string library. With the release of version 2.0, I am returning to work on the larger project now, and the results will be available under an ansak-lib repository.

ansak-string is mostly about purifying input and performing conversions more simply than other available APIs. If your string (whether it's 7-bit ASCII, UTF-8, UTF-16, UCS-2 or UTF-32/UCS-4) makes it through my APIs (into 7-bit ASCII, UTF-8 etc.), then that's what it is. No more, no less. This includes filtering for publicly assigned Unicode values, currently following Unicode 13, supporting through cmake switch every major version back to 7.0.

A simple pair of split and join templates, based on character types (not strings as in their python analogue) and using basic_string for their processing are also present.

Commercial Support:

Available on request, subject to reasonable terms we can agree on. Please contact me via anklassen (at) onepost dot net.

Requests for more conversions from Windows Code Pages and/or ISO/ECMA 8859 encoding standards will be considered individually.

Additional stuff:

• unicodeLength gives number of UCS-4 codes (regardless of composite/composable points) in a string
• split and join, like python's string and array methods
• all-Unicode-sensitive "tolower". It can operate in "Turkic" mode if you pass in an (optional) constant C-string for a Turkic language's ISO-639 two or three character code. In this mode, I-dot and dotless-i are handled correctly for those languages.

ISO-639 codes for Turkic languages:

• Azerbaizhani: "az", "azb", "aze", "azj"
• Kazakh: "kk", "kaz"
• Tatar: "tt", "tat"
• Turkish "tr", "tur"

Deploying:

• On Linux -- use cmake to build the release version and when you're done, copy (not recursively) the files from interface/ to /usr/include/ansak or /usr/local/include/ansak (you'll have to become root to do so); copy libansakstring.a from the root of your cmake build directory to /usr/lib or /usr/local/lib. FindANSAK.cmake in your project will be able to find them there. (TODO: build package for this)

• On macOS -- do the same as for Linux

• On Windows (Cygwin/MINGW) -- do the same as for Linux

• On Windows (Microsoft Compilers) -- For Windows, you will need a "Release" version of the library for each of Win32 and x86_64 (or ARM or ARM64) that you plan to use. If you want the resulting executables to be debuggable, you will want to build RelWithDebInfo versions, too. And if you plan to debug your program, you will want to build Debug as well. The recommended deployment will be from a "Third Party Software" directory containing an include directory, and a lib directory. The best candidate for this is probably C:\ProgramData but you can over-ride this. Copy (not recursively) the contents of interface\ from ansak-string into the include\ansak directory. Within the lib\ directory, create as many platform- specific sub-directories as you need. Within each of them, create as many of Release\, Debug\ and RelWithDebInfo\ as you need. Build as many of the libraries as you see fit and copy them to the appropriate directory by architecture and build type. (TODO: build NSIS installer for this?) By default, ansak libraries will build for use with the DLL-based C/C++ runtime. If you need to build them for statically-linked C/C++ runtime feel free to do so. The single-threaded libraries seem to have vanished and it seems that all but a very narrow group of compiler writers prefer the DLL- based runtime. FindANSAK.cmake on Windows will look for ANSAK components

  • by default, as sub-directories of C:\ProgramData
  • this can be over-ridden by an environment or CMake variable: PROGRAM_DATA
  • this can, in its turn be over-ridden by an environment or CMake variable ANSAK_DIR

Using:

When you want to use ansak-string (or later, other ANSAK Software components), copy FindANSAK.cmake from the source/ into a cmake/modules directory at the root of your project. Add a section like this, early, to your root CMakeLists.txt file:

if("${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}" STREQUAL "${CMAKE_SOURCE_DIR}")`
    list(INSERT CMAKE_MODULE_PATH` 0 ${CMAKE_CURRENT_SOURCE_DIR}/cmake/modules)`
endif()

Add find_package(ANSAK) to your root CMakeLists.txt file; use the variables you see in your CMakeCache.txt file as you would for any other dependant component.

Long-Term Goal:

The ultimate goal of these libraries is to support a simple household expense tracking program that I plan to release under an appropriate open source license, probably using Qt for User Interface, sqlite3 for storage and implemented with the best that C++11/14/7 can supply.

I have added FindANSAK.cmake to ansak-string, to be mirrored and kept up to date in on-going releases of ansak-lib.

The contents of the ansak-lib branch of ansak-string have been pulled out into their own repository, ansak-lib, which allows their release cycle to be completely independent of that of ansak-string, appropriate because Unicode release cycles are on their own time-table, and outside of changes there, ansak-string doesn't have a lot of outstanding tasks waiting for attention.