Hi, I'm not real happy with std::string, largely because it seems poorly suited to UTF-8. I'm happier with other classes such as Glib::ustring. [1,2] Is it possible to use boost::format with such a class? I'd previously thought that boost as a whole expected you to use std::string, but the recent discussion of boost::regex + Glib::ustring gave me some hope. It seems the requirements for boost::regex are more simple - a bidirectional, read-only character (not byte) iterator. That should be easy enough to provide for any UTF-8 string class. I do see explicit mention of std::basic_string in the boost::format headers, but I thought I'd ask anyway. (I likely will find or make another class to avoid pulling in all of glib. But it would be similar to Glib::ustring.) [1] - more in-depth discussion of Glib::ustring vs. std::string at <http://www.gtkmm.org/gtkmm2/docs/reference/html/ classGlib_1_1ustring.html#_details> [2] - additional reasons for disliking std::string at http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/string_discussion.html Thanks, Scott