Windows API: ANSI and Wide-Character Strings — Is it UTF8 or ASCII? UTF-16 or UCS-2 LE?

Question

I\'m not quite pro with encodings, but here\'s what I think I know (though it may be wrong):

1. ASCII is a 7-bit, fixed-length encoding, with the characters you c

Answer 1

First of all you'll find plenty of information in this SO topic.

ASCII is a charset, not encoding. Now, there's a number of 8-bit charsets, one of them being set as default in the system (you can change it in Regional Settings). *A functions accept 8-bit characters in that charset. UTF-8 is not a charset, but encoding of Unicode charset. *W functions, as I understand, use UTF-16 rather than UCS-2.