Is wchar_t needed for unicode support?

Question

Is the wchar_t type required for unicode support? If not then what\'s the point of this multibyte type? Why would you use wchar_t when you could accomplish the

Answer 1

wchar_t is not required. It's not even guaranteed to have a specific encoding. The point is to provide a data type that represents the wide characters native to your system, similar to char representing native characters. On Windows, for example, you can use wchar_t to access the wide character Win32 API functions.

Answer 2

char is generally a single byte. (sizeof(char) must be equal to 1).

wchar_t was added to the language specifically to suppose multibyte characters.