Do C++11 regular expressions work with UTF-8 strings?

Question

If I want to use C++11\'s regular expressions with unicode strings, will they work with char* as UTF-8 or do I have to convert them to a wchar_t* string?

Answer 1

I have a use-case where I need to handle potentially unicode strings when looking for Cartesian coordinates, and this sample shows how I handle it as advised for std::wregex and std::wstring, against potentially unicode characters for a parsing module.

static bool isCoordinate(std::wstring token)
{   
    std::wregex re(L"^(-?[[:digit:]]+)$");
    std::wsmatch match;
    return std::regex_search(token, match, re);
}

int wmain(int argc, wchar_t * argv[])
{
    // Testing against not a number nor unicode designation
    bool coord = ::isCoordinate(L"أَبْجَدِيَّة عَرَبِيَّة‎中文"); 

    if (!coord)
        return 0;
    return 1;
}