Correctly reading a utf-16 text file into a string without external libraries?

Question

I\'ve been using StackOverflow since the beginning, and have on occasion been tempted to post questions, but I\'ve always either figured them out myself or found answers pos

Answer 1

When you open a file for UTF-16, you must open it in binary mode. This is because in text mode, certain characters are interpreted specially - specifically, 0x0d is filtered out completely and 0x1a marks the end of the file. There are some UTF-16 characters that will have one of those bytes as half of the character code and will mess up the reading of the file. This is not a bug, it is intentional behavior and is the sole reason for having separate text and binary modes.

For the reason why 0x1a is considered the end of a file, see this blog post from Raymond Chen tracing the history of Ctrl-Z. It's basically backwards compatibility run amok.