Re: string class and UNICODE?

From:

"Carl Daniel [VC++ MVP]" <cpdaniel_remove_this_and_nospam@mvps.org.nospam>

Newsgroups:

microsoft.public.vc.language

Date:

Sat, 17 May 2008 19:25:51 -0700

Message-ID:

<uwoN$5IuIHA.552@TK2MSFTNGP06.phx.gbl>

lost_in_space wrote:

Hi, all -

How do I use the wchar_t based basic_string derived 'string' class? I
though all I had to do was #define _UNICODE and include <string>,
and the class implementation would be typedef'd to the wchar_t based
version. I have selected 'Use UNICODE character set' in my project
settings, but it seems that the 'string' class is still based on
'char', and not 'wchar_t'.
Is there something I'm missing?

Yes - you're missing the fact that it doesn't work that way.

Regardless of UNICODE or _UNICODE, std :: string is always a narrow-charater
string and std :: wstring is always a wide character string, as specified in
the C++ standard (which knows nothing about those macro definitions).

Some people prefer to use something like:

#include <string>

typedef std :: basic_string<TCHAR> tstring;

....while others think that's completely evil. Personally, I think you need
to consider how your program uses the strings and make the appropriate
choice. Do you always want wide-strings? If so, just use std :: wstring.

-cd