Cross-platform strings (and Unicode) in C++

Question

So I\'ve finally gotten back to my main task - porting a rather large C++ project from Windows to the Mac.

Straight away I\'ve been hit by the problem where wchar_t

Answer 1

As a rule of thumb: UTF-16 for processing, UTF-8 for communication & storage.

Sure, any rule can be broken and this one is not carved in stone. But you have to know when it is ok to break it.

For instance it might be a good idea to use something else if the environment you are using wants something else. But Mac OS X APIs use UTF-16, same as Windows. So UTF-16 makes more sense. It is more straightforward to convert before you put/get things on the net (because you probably do it in 2-3 routines) than doing all the conversions to call OS APIs.

It also matter the type of application you develop. If it is something with very little text processing, and very little calls to the system (something like an email server that mostly moves things around without changing them), then UTF-8 might be a good choice.

So, as much as you might hate this answer, "it depends".