Read Unicode UTF-8 file into wstring

With C++11 support, you can use std::codecvt_utf8 facet which encapsulates conversion between a UTF-8 encoded byte string and UCS2 or UCS4 character string and which can be used to read and write UTF-8 files, both text and binary.

In order to use facet you usually create locale object that encapsulates culture-specific information as a set of facets that collectively define a specific localized environment. Once you have a locale object, you can imbue your stream buffer with it:

#include <sstream>
#include <fstream>
#include <codecvt>

std::wstring readFile(const char* filename)
{
    std::wifstream wif(filename);
    wif.imbue(std::locale(std::locale::empty(), new std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t>));
    std::wstringstream wss;
    wss << wif.rdbuf();
    return wss.str();
}

which can be used like this:

std::wstring wstr = readFile("a.txt");

Alternatively you can set the global C++ locale before you work with string streams which causes all future calls to the std::locale default constructor to return a copy of the global C++ locale (you don't need to explicitly imbue stream buffers with it then):

std::locale::global(std::locale(std::locale::empty(), new std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t>));

According to a comment by @Hans Passant, the simplest way is to use _wfopen_s. Open the file with mode rt, ccs=UTF-8.

Here is another pure C++ solution that works at least with VC++ 2010:

#include <locale>
#include <codecvt>
#include <string>
#include <fstream>
#include <cstdlib>

int main() {
    const std::locale empty_locale = std::locale::empty();
    typedef std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t> converter_type;
    const converter_type* converter = new converter_type;
    const std::locale utf8_locale = std::locale(empty_locale, converter);
    std::wifstream stream(L"test.txt");
    stream.imbue(utf8_locale);
    std::wstring line;
    std::getline(stream, line);
    std::system("pause");
}

Except for locale::empty() (here locale::global() might work as well) and the wchar_t* overload of the basic_ifstream constructor, this should even be pretty standard-compliant (where “standard” means C++0x, of course).

Here's a platform-specific function for Windows only:

size_t GetSizeOfFile(const std::wstring& path)
{
    struct _stat fileinfo;
    _wstat(path.c_str(), &fileinfo);
    return fileinfo.st_size;
}

std::wstring LoadUtf8FileToString(const std::wstring& filename)
{
    std::wstring buffer;            // stores file contents
    FILE* f = _wfopen(filename.c_str(), L"rtS, ccs=UTF-8");

    // Failed to open file
    if (f == NULL)
    {
        // ...handle some error...
        return buffer;
    }

    size_t filesize = GetSizeOfFile(filename);

    // Read entire file contents in to memory
    if (filesize > 0)
    {
        buffer.resize(filesize);
        size_t wchars_read = fread(&(buffer.front()), sizeof(wchar_t), filesize, f);
        buffer.resize(wchars_read);
        buffer.shrink_to_fit();
    }

    fclose(f);

    return buffer;
}

Use like so:

std::wstring mytext = LoadUtf8FileToString(L"C:\\MyUtf8File.txt");

Note the entire file is loaded in to memory, so you might not want to use it for very large files.

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <string>
#include <locale>
#include <cstdlib>

int main()
{
    std::wifstream wif("filename.txt");
    wif.imbue(std::locale("zh_CN.UTF-8"));

    std::wcout.imbue(std::locale("zh_CN.UTF-8"));
    std::wcout << wif.rdbuf();
}

This question was addressed in Confused about C++'s std::wstring, UTF-16, UTF-8 and displaying strings in a windows GUI. In sum, wstring is based upon the UCS-2 standard, which is the predecessor of UTF-16. This is a strictly two byte standard. I believe this covers Arabic.

This is a bit raw, but how about reading the file as plain old bytes then cast the byte buffer to wchar_t* ?

Something like:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
std::wstring ReadFileIntoWstring(const std::wstring& filepath)
{
    std::wstring wstr;
    std::ifstream file (filepath.c_str(), std::ios::in|std::ios::binary|std::ios::ate);
    size_t size = (size_t)file.tellg();
    file.seekg (0, std::ios::beg);
    char* buffer = new char [size];
    file.read (buffer, size);
    wstr = (wchar_t*)buffer;
    file.close();
    delete[] buffer;
    return wstr;
}