fstream::open() Unicode or Non-Ascii characters don't work (with std::ios::out) on Windows

Question

In a C++ project, I want to open a file (fstream::open()) (which seems to be a major problem). The Windows build of my program fails miserably.

Answer 1

In Microsoft implementations of STL, there's a non-standard extension (overload) to allow unicode support for UTF-16 encoded strings.

Just pass UTF-16 encoded std::wstring to fstream::open(). This is the only way to make it work with fstream.

You can read more on what I find to be the easiest way to support unicode on windows here: http://utf8everywhere.org/