Cross Platform Internationalization Concerns

[humble_learner]

[1]
The file need not be ASCII. The INI file could have contents in Japanese. As far as the end user is concerned with the Japanese system locale, he can just type in contents into the INI file - which is to be read by the backend engine, processed and passed onto the front end which displays the processed data again.

[2]
You said that the 'char' data type is to be used with UTF-8 encoding. Now, considering that I have a char pointer (*) to a string made up of UTF-8 encoded characters. How do I find out the string length ? Will a simple strlen() work ? This might not work because UTF-8 could involve multiple bytes to represent a character too.

If I were to decide on using UTF-8 and base my source code on UTF-8, how does this become portable with respect to Windows ? Will I end up needed separate #ifdef for windows and unix ?

[3]
Internationalized text can come from the GUI (implemented in C#) or from the Command Line Interface (implemented in C++) to the back end engine in C++ which again writes or reads internationalized contents from the INI file.