Chapter 5. Data Storage

It is not an overstatement to say that every software application processes some kind of data. Without data, an application's functionality would be rather modest, after all. Data can come from different sources—such as user input, network communication, and so on. It can also be stored locally on behalf of the application.

Knowing that data handling is an inevitable part of your code, this chapter will focus on it, and particularly on textual data. If you ask "why?", the answer is simple: binary data is rather simple and therefore simply boring—it is simply a sequence of bytes, and they can represent virtually anything. In case of text data, the situation differs—there are some common practices and libraries for processing it, and that's what we are going to discuss further. There is also a trend to prefer text data over binary in many cases—the success of text-based XML, for example, proves this.

The first topic will focus on the internationalization of your application...