How to deal with Unicode strings in C/C++ in a cross-platform friendly way?

Question

On platforms different than Windows you could easily use char * strings and treat them as UTF-8.

The problem is that on Windows you are required to acce

Answer 1

If you writing portable code:

1st Never use wchar_t it is nor portable and its encoding is not well defined between platforms (utf-16 windows/utf-32 all others).

Never use TChar, use plain std::string encoded as UTF-8.

When dealing with Brain Damaged Win32 API just convert UTF-8 string to UTF-16 before calling it.

See https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1049947/should-utf-16-be-considered-harmful as well about how Windows project adopt UTF-8 as main encoding.