The Unicode Character Streams
The Unicode character streams read UTF-16 characters (input streams) and write UTF-16 characters (output streams). They allow operations on a single character or on a group of characters.
UTF-16 is a character encoding form for Unicode characters that represents each 21-bit Unicode code point in one or two 16-bit code units. For more information on Unicode and its various encoding forms, see the Internationalization Module User’s Guide.
The Advanced Tools Module Streams package stores UTF-16 characters using instance variables of type RWUChar, which is a typedef for unsigned short. The C++ type wchar_t is not used because its size is platform-dependent.
NOTE: For a complete description of the operations supported by the Unicode character streams, read about RWUCharOutputStream for the Unicode output streams and RWUCharInputStream for the Unicode input streams in the SourcePro API Reference Guide. These two classes are the handle classes used to manipulate the Unicode character streams.
In addition to the classes described in the common architecture sections, the Unicode character streams include the concrete classes shown in Figure 9.
Figure 9 – Unicode streams
Classes RWUCharOutputStreamImp, RWByteOutputStream, RWUCharInputStreamImp, and RWByteInputStream belong to the common framework.
None of the concrete Unicode character streams are terminal streaming elements. They require a binary stream handle when constructed and use this handle as the sink of bytes for the output streams or as the source of bytes for the input streams.
