Yet another Unicode v Ansi question

[Igor Vartanov]

each of which work perfectly well in their respective environments

I believe, this is the key point. The application domain internally uses whatever you want, until you have to interface with Win32 API domain. Any time that you need to pass a string across domain boundaries you must comply with domain specifics converting the string when needed. Explicitly, or by means of a third party wrapper.

when the Character Set properties is set to 'Use Unicode Character Set' in that std::string manipulations do not perform as expected

Sorry, I don't follow you here. std::string is always ANSI string, and std::wstring is always wide character string disregarding Character Set setting.

Besides, using 'Use Unicode Character Set' setting literally means: use wchar_t characters (which is UTF-16LE in Windows) when expanding T-family macros, and in fact it does nothing but defining UNICODE and _UNICODE macros project wide. By no means it implies any magic that allows ANSI strings become UTF-8 strings all of a sudden.