UTF8 vs. UTF16 vs. char* vs. what? Someone explain this mess to me!

Question

I\'ve managed to mostly ignore all this multi-byte character stuff, but now I need to do some UI work and I know my ignorance in this area is going to catch up with me! Can anyo

Answer 1

Received wisdom suggests that Spolsky's article misses a couple of important points.

This article is recommended as being more complete: The Unicode® Standard: A Technical Introduction

This article is also a good introduction: Unicode Basics

The latter in particular gives an overview of the character encoding forms and schemes for Unicode.