Read Unicode UTF-8 file into wstring

Question

How can I read a Unicode (UTF-8) file into wstring(s) on the Windows platform?

Answer 1

This is a bit raw, but how about reading the file as plain old bytes then cast the byte buffer to wchar_t* ?

Something like:

#include 
#include 
std::wstring ReadFileIntoWstring(const std::wstring& filepath)
{
    std::wstring wstr;
    std::ifstream file (filepath.c_str(), std::ios::in|std::ios::binary|std::ios::ate);
    size_t size = (size_t)file.tellg();
    file.seekg (0, std::ios::beg);
    char* buffer = new char [size];
    file.read (buffer, size);
    wstr = (wchar_t*)buffer;
    file.close();
    delete[] buffer;
    return wstr;
}