Raw string literals and file codification

Question

C++11 introduced the raw string literals which can be pretty useful to represent quoted strings, literals with lots of special symbols like windows file paths, regex express

Answer 1

Yes it matters, even to compile your source. You will gonna need to use somenthing like -finput-charset=UTF-16 to compile if you are using gcc (the same thing should apply to VS).

But I IHMO, there are something more fundamental to take into account in your code. For example, std::string are containers to char, which is 1 byte large. If you are dealing with a UTF-16 for instance, you will need 2 bytes, so (despite a 'by-hand conversion') you will need at least a wchar_t (std::wstring) (or, to be safer a char16_t, to be safer in C++11).

So, to use Unicode you will need a container for it and a compiling environment prepared to handle your Unicode codifided sources.

Answer 2

Raw string literals change how escapes are dealt with but do not change how encodings are handled. Raw string literals still convert their contents from the source encoding to produce a string in the appropriate execution encoding.

The type of a string literal and the appropriate execution encoding is determined entirely by the prefix. R alone always produces a char string in the narrow execution encoding. If the source is UTF-16 (and the compiler supports UTF-16 as the source encoding) then the compiler will convert the string literal contents from UTF-16 to the narrow execution encoding.