C++: LPWSTR prints as an address in cout

Question

I have a variable of type LPTSTR, which I print to std::cout with <<. In an ANSI system (don\'t know exactly where it is determi

Answer 1

For Unicode strings you want wcout.

You may be seeing hex because the ANSI/ASCII output stream doesn't know how to handle Unicode characters.

LPTSTR and LPWSTR are actually C-isms inherited from the C Windows API days. For C++ I would strongly encourage you to use std::string and/or std::wstring instead.

If you need to roll your own macro, you'll want something like:

#ifdef _UNICODE
std::wostream& COUT = std::wcout;
#else
std::ostream& COUT = std::cout;
#endif