Cross-platform iteration of Unicode string (counting Graphemes using ICU)

Question

I want to iterate each character of a Unicode string, treating each surrogate pair and combining character sequence as a single unit (one grapheme).

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Answer 1

ICU has a very old interface, Boost.Locale is much better:

#include <iostream>
#include <string_view>

#include <boost/locale.hpp>

using namespace std::string_view_literals;

int main()
{
    boost::locale::generator gen;
    auto string = "noël                                                                     

                                                        
            

Answer 2

Glib's ustring class gives you utf-8 strings, if using utf-8 is ok for you. It is designed to be similar to std::string. Since utf-8 is native for Linux, your task is quite easy:

int main()
{
    Glib::ustring s = L"नमस्ते";
    cout << s.size();
}

you can also iterate on string's characters as usual with Glib::ustring::iterator

Answer 3

You should be able to use the ICU BreakIterator for this (the character instance assuming it is feature-equivalent to the Java version).