@guy038 said in Columns++ version 1.3: All Unicode, all the time:
So, if I understand correctly, the Boost regex engine hasn’t updated Unicode since version 5.2 ? Very surprising !
That part, at least, is easy to answer.
For the most part, Boost::regex doesn’t directly implement Unicode properties. It relies on either the operating system’s character classification routines or ICU.
It’s also possible to define a custom character traits class in C++ for use by Boost::regex.
Notepad++ and (I think) MultiReplace let Boost::regex fall back to Windows’ character classification. So that will update when and only when Windows updates.
Windows only handles “ANSI” and UTF-16. To work with the full range of Unicode code points, Boost::regex requires either ICU or a custom character traits class.
I wanted to use ICU in Columns++, but after searching and asking in a couple forums, I could not find a way to incorporate ICU in a plugin. Everything I could find talked about installing ICU on the operating system. I finally gave up, never having determined if it is even possible to deploy ICU at the application/plugin level as opposed to installing it as an operating system component.
Instead, Columns++ uses the custom character traits class approach to provide character traits for 32-bit Unicode characters — which means I had to invent my own process for analyzing the Unicode character files, compiling them into something reasonably compact and fast, and translating that into character properties. So that’s why it was possible for me to update to Unicode 17.0. That wouldn’t apply to Notepad++/MultiReplace or Boost::regex itself, because they don’t directly include anything to do with Unicode character properties; they’re dependent on Windows.
