C-Style UTF-8 Strings for Rust

This project makes it easier to establish guarantees when interfacing with C APIs that require passing around UTF-8 encoded strings.

Documentation

What is UTF-8?

UTF-8 is the character encoding chosen by much of the programming community since 2008, including Rust with its str primitive.

UTF-8 is capable of representing all 1,112,064 code points of the Unicode standard. Code points are variable-width, ranging from 8 to 32 bits wide.

Where does UTF-8 appear in C?

UTF-8 in SDL

The Simple DirectMedia Layer (SDL) library exposes certain APIs that only interface with UTF-8 encoded C strings. Here's a potential wrapper one could create around SDL:

impl Window {
    /* ... */

    fn title(&self) -> &CUtf8 {
        unsafe {
            let title = SDL_GetWindowTitle(self.inner);
            CUtf8::from_ptr(title).unwrap()
        }
    }

    fn set_title(&mut self, title: &CUtf8) {
        unsafe {
            SDL_SetWindowTitle(self.inner, title.as_ptr());
        }
    }

    /* ... */
}

Creating a &CUtf8 instance to interface with the above code can be done easily via the c_utf8! macro:

window.set_title(c_utf8!("MyAwesomeApp"));

Installation

This crate is available on crates.io and can be used by adding the following to your project's Cargo.toml:

[dependencies]
c_utf8 = "0.1.0"

and this to your crate root (lib.rs or main.rs):

#[macro_use]
extern crate c_utf8;

License

This project is licensed under either of

• Apache License, Version 2.0 (LICENSE-APACHE or http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0)

• MIT License (LICENSE-MIT or http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT)

at your option.