How to deal with Unicode strings in C/C++ in a cross-platform friendly way?

Question

On platforms different than Windows you could easily use char * strings and treat them as UTF-8.

The problem is that on Windows you are required to acce

Answer 1

If you writing portable code:

1st Never use wchar_t it is nor portable and its encoding is not well defined between platforms (utf-16 windows/utf-32 all others).

Never use TChar, use plain std::string encoded as UTF-8.

When dealing with Brain Damaged Win32 API just convert UTF-8 string to UTF-16 before calling it.

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1049947/should-utf-16-be-considered-harmful as well about how Windows project adopt UTF-8 as main encoding.

Answer 2

You can keep all your strings UTF-8 encoded and just convert them to UTF-16 before interacting with WIn32 API. Take a look at UTF8-CPP library for some easy to use conversion functions

Answer 3

I can only suggest you to check this library out: http://cppcms.sourceforge.net/boost_locale/docs/
It might help, it's a boost candidate for now but I believe it will make it.