String literal to basic_string

Question

When it comes to internationalization & Unicode, I\'m an idiot American programmer. Here\'s the deal.

#include 
using namespace std;

typedef          


        

Answer 1

Narrow string literals are defined to be const char and there aren't unsigned string literals[1], so you'll have to cast:

ustring s = reinterpret_cast("Hello, UTF-8");

Of course you can put that long thing into an inline function:

inline const unsigned char *uc_str(const char *s){
  return reinterpret_cast(s);
}

ustring s = uc_str("Hello, UTF-8");

Or you can just use basic_string and get away with it 99.9% of the time you're dealing with UTF-8.

[1] Unless char is unsigned, but whether it is or not is implementation-defined, blah, blah.