Great Big Can O' Worms (UNICΘDЭ)

[Chris_F]

Ok, so like many programmers, I've just put my fingers in my ears and closed my eyes, pretending unicode didn't exist and ANSI strings were the only string representation.

Now suddenly I find myself needing to write code that can properly handle foreign text. If only things were easier...

If Windows and the C++ Standard Library had full support for UTF-8, my life would be easy, but as far as I know, they don't.

Does Windows even have full support for all unicode characters? Or only 16-bit characters? If wchar_t maps to ushort, how does it handle 3 or 4 byte characters? Does it handle them at all?

Visual Studio seems to have added char16_t and char32_t, along with u16string and u32string, but it seems to lack support for the corresponding literals u" " and U" ", or am I missing something?

It seems to me like I should maybe use wstring internally, and crate functions to convert incoming UTF-8 to, what I assume is UTF-16.

I've read a lot of posts on this topic and various articles, and it still confuses the hell out of me. It creates more questions than answers.