C++ Convert string (or char*) to wstring (or wchar_t*)

Question

string s = \"おはよう\";
wstring ws = FUNCTION(s, ws);

How would i assign the contents of s to ws?

Searched google and used some techniques but

Answer 1

If you are using Windows/Visual Studio and need to convert a string to wstring you could use:

#include 
#include 
...
string s = "some string";
CA2W ca2w(s.c_str());
wstring w = ca2w;
printf("%s = %ls", s.c_str(), w.c_str());

Same procedure for converting a wstring to string (sometimes you will need to specify a codepage):

#include 
#include 
...
wstring w = L"some wstring";
CW2A cw2a(w.c_str());
string s = cw2a;
printf("%s = %ls", s.c_str(), w.c_str());

You could specify a codepage and even UTF8 (that's pretty nice when working with JNI/Java). A standard way of converting a std::wstring to utf8 std::string is showed in this answer.

// 
// using ATL
CA2W ca2w(str, CP_UTF8);

// 
// or the standard way taken from the answer above
#include 
#include 

// convert UTF-8 string to wstring
std::wstring utf8_to_wstring (const std::string& str) {
    std::wstring_convert> myconv;
    return myconv.from_bytes(str);
}

// convert wstring to UTF-8 string
std::string wstring_to_utf8 (const std::wstring& str) {
    std::wstring_convert> myconv;
    return myconv.to_bytes(str);
}

If you want to know more about codepages there is an interesting article on Joel on Software: The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets.

These CA2W (Convert Ansi to Wide=unicode) macros are part of ATL and MFC String Conversion Macros, samples included.

Sometimes you will need to disable the security warning #4995', I don't know of other workaround (to me it happen when I compiled for WindowsXp in VS2012).

#pragma warning(push)
#pragma warning(disable: 4995)
#include 
#include 
#pragma warning(pop)

Edit: Well, according to this article the article by Joel appears to be: "while entertaining, it is pretty light on actual technical details". Article: What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encoding And Character Sets To Work With Text.