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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-15T00:00:35+00:00

For convenience, I’d like to be able to cast between two types defined in

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For convenience, I’d like to be able to cast between two types defined in other libraries. (Specifically, QString from the Qt library and UnicodeString from the ICU library.) Right now, I have created utility functions in a project namespace:

namespace MyProject {
    const icu_44::UnicodeString ToUnicodeString(const QString& value);
    const QString ToQString(const icu_44::UnicodeString& value);
}

That’s all well and good, but I’m wondering if there’s a more elegant way. Ideally, I’d like to be able to convert between them using a cast operator. I do, however, want to retain the explicit nature of the conversion. An implicit conversion should not be possible.

Is there a more elegant way to achieve this without modifying the source code of the libraries? Some operator overload syntax, perhaps?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    If what you’re striving for is to be able to say

    QStrign qs;
UnicodeString us(qs);

    or

    UnicodeString us;
QString qs(us);

    then no, you can’t do that unless you can change either of the classes. You can, of course, introduce a new string:

    NewString ns;
UnicodeString us(ns);
QString qs(us);

NewString nsus(us);
NewString nsqs(qs);

    I’m not sure about this approach’s elegance though, compared with your two explicit conversion functions.

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