C STL

Primitive type mapping

Mapping KS types to C++ is pretty straight-forward:

type	C++ type
no type	std::string
u1	uint8_t
u2	uint16_t
u4	uint32_t
u8	uint64_t
s1	int8_t
s2	int16_t
s4	int32_t
s8	int64_t
str, strz	std::string

Note that both byte arrays and strings are mapped to std::string — that's because when we store byte array, we need something that would be able to both hold the byte buffer and store it's length (or at least able to derive it).

String encoding

There's no universal agreement on dealing with encodings in C++, so KS allows you to choose one of the few popular approaches. You can choose how to deal with string encoding using a compile-time define.

• Ignore encodings at all. In this mode, all string parsing operations just ignore any encoding specifications and pass raw bytes as a string to application. Note that in some cases it might break some .ksy files that actually depend on string being properly decoded / converted.
• Convert all incoming byte streams into strings in a single, one-size-fits-all encoding (for example, UTF8, as suggested by UTF8 Everywhere Manifesto). By default, the Since there's no universal way to do it, KS would use one of platform-dependent ways (which can be also enforced by specifying specific defines):
  • Use POSIX iconv library — usually preinstalled (or included in libc) on all POSIX systems, can be linked as external library on most other systems (i.e. Windows)
  • Use Windows API functions MultiByteToWideChar and WideCharToMultiByte — obviously, available only on Windows platform
  • Use ICU library