Which one to use, utf8 or Ascii

Question

Been doing quite a lot of work with Qt and it just hit me, which one should I use to convert my QStrings to QByteArray and back? And there is some other issues where I dont know what to do exactly.

For example when dealing with QUrl. I have an object where on of the members are a QString and I'm setting it like this:

blobByType->setBlobAbsoluteUri(request.url().toEncoded());

The toEncoded() converts it to utf8 and and all non-ASCII characters are then percent encode. When I then set the QString to a QByteArray it automatically converts it Ascii.

Also, when doing most of my converting from QString to QByteArray I currently use toUtf8().

My question is, what should I use when converting from QString to QByteArray and vice versa?

You don't say what you intend to use this QByteArray for, or what kind of strings you intend to store in it. — Nicol Bolas
– Nicol Bolas, Commented Apr 17, 2012 at 1:01
the qbytearray is needed when dealing with some libraries and some functions that wants a char array. using QString — chikuba
– chikuba, Commented Apr 17, 2012 at 1:07
OK, then what do those libraries and functions accept? Do they expect UTF-8, or do they only take ASCII? Or do they take something else entirely, like Latin-1 and such? — Nicol Bolas
– Nicol Bolas, Commented Apr 17, 2012 at 1:07
actaully have no idea to be honest. im using utf8 for the base64 encoding lib atm and the key that im generating seems to work — chikuba
– chikuba, Commented Apr 17, 2012 at 1:22
Base64 uses ASCII. Granted, any ASCII string is also UTF8, so it doesn't really matter. — Nicol Bolas
– Nicol Bolas, Commented Apr 17, 2012 at 2:10

slartibartfast · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-16 23:10:28Z

3

UTF-8 and ASCII are usually exactly the same thing when dealing with English characters. The difference is that if you ever use non-English characters UTF-8 will be able to support it while ASCII won't. I suggest using UTF-8 just to play it safe.

answered Apr 16, 2012 at 23:10

slartibartfast

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3 Comments

chikuba Over a year ago

how to make QString use fromUtf8() when creating string?

slartibartfast Over a year ago

newString = QString::fromUtf8(yourArray);? I don't really understand what you're asking...

chikuba Over a year ago

qt-project.org/doc/qt-4.8/qstring.html#QString-9 currently use the constructor which converts it to ascii

shark555 · Accepted Answer · 2012-04-16 23:08:07Z

1

If there is a chance that you are going to use non-english characters it's better to use UTF-8. It's standard and good practice to use it because you never know who might be reusing your code in the future.

answered Apr 16, 2012 at 23:08

shark555

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3 Comments

chikuba Over a year ago

so should i change how QString() converts QBYteArray?

shark555 Over a year ago

I'm not QT expert. You wrote, you were using toUtf8() doing conversion. I understand you already use UTF8. So my piece of advice is keep doing it.

Frank Osterfeld Over a year ago

If you're worried about implicit conversions, I'd suggest to define QT_NO_CAST_FROM_ASCII and QT_NO_CAST_TO_ASCII to disable them alltogether. And then use toUtf8/fromUtf8,QLatin1String() etc. to explicitely convert.

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