Unicode: How to integrate Jansson(JSON library) with ICU special UTF-8 data types?

Question

I've been developing a C application that expects wide range of UTF-8 characters, so I started using ICU library to support Unicode characters, but it seems things aren't working nicely with other libraries(mainly, jansson, a JSON library).

Even though jansson claims it fully supports UTF-8, it only expects chars as parameters(IIRC, a single byte isn't enough for Unicode chars), while ICU uses a special type called UChar(16byte sized character, at least on my system).

Casting a Unicode character to a regular character doesn't seem like a solution to me, since casting bigger data to smaller ones will cause data lose. I tried casting anyway; it didn't work.

So my question would be: How can I make the two libraries work nicely together?

Answer 1

Get ICU to produce output in UTF-8 using toUTF8/toUTF8String. (toUTF8String gives you a std::string so .c_str() to get the char* that Jansson wants.