Is a wide character string literal starting with L like L“Hello World” guaranteed to be encoded in Unicode?

Question

I\'ve recently tried to get the full picture about what steps it takes to create platform independent C++ applications that support unicode. A thing that is confusing to me

Answer 1

The C++03 does not mention unicode (future C++0x does). Currently you have to either use external libraries (ICU, UTF-CPP, etc.) or build your own solution using platform specific code. As others have mentioned, wchar_t encoding (or even size) is not specified. Consequently, string literal encoding is implementation specific. However, you can give unicode codepoints in string literals by using \x \u \U escapes.

Typically unicode apps in Windows use wchar_t (with UTF-16 encoding) as internal character format, because it makes using Windows APIs easier as Windows itself uses UTF-16. Unix/Linux unicode apps in turn usually use char (with UTF-8 encoding) internally. If you want to exchange data between different platforms, UTF-8 is usual choice for data transfer encoding.