std::wstring VS std::string

I am not able to understand the differences between std::string and std::wstring . I know wstring supports wide characters such as Unicode characters. I have got the following questions:

string ? wstring ?

std::string is a basic_string templated on a char , and std::wstring on a wchar_t .

char vs. wchar_t

char is supposed to hold a character, usually a 1-byte character. wchar_t is supposed to hold a wide character, and then, things get tricky: On Linux, a wchar_t is 4 bytes, while on Windows, it's 2 bytes

what about Unicode, then?

The problem is that neither char nor wchar_t is directly tied to unicode.

On Linux?

Let's take a Linux OS: My Ubuntu system is already unicode aware. When I work with a char string, it is natively encoded in UTF-8 (ie Unicode string of chars). The following code:

#include <cstring>
#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
   const char text[] = "olé" ;


   std::cout << "sizeof(char)    : " << sizeof(char) << std::endl ;
   std::cout << "text            : " << text << std::endl ;
   std::cout << "sizeof(text)    : " << sizeof(text) << std::endl ;
   std::cout << "strlen(text)    : " << strlen(text) << std::endl ;

   std::cout << "text(bytes)     :" ;

   for(size_t i = 0, iMax = strlen(text); i < iMax; ++i)
   {
      std::cout << " " << static_cast<unsigned int>(
                              static_cast<unsigned char>(text[i])
                          );
   }

   std::cout << std::endl << std::endl ;

   // - - - 

   const wchar_t wtext[] = L"olé" ;

   std::cout << "sizeof(wchar_t) : " << sizeof(wchar_t) << std::endl ;
   //std::cout << "wtext           : " << wtext << std::endl ; <- error
   std::cout << "wtext           : UNABLE TO CONVERT NATIVELY." << std::endl ;
   std::wcout << L"wtext           : " << wtext << std::endl;

   std::cout << "sizeof(wtext)   : " << sizeof(wtext) << std::endl ;
   std::cout << "wcslen(wtext)   : " << wcslen(wtext) << std::endl ;

   std::cout << "wtext(bytes)    :" ;

   for(size_t i = 0, iMax = wcslen(wtext); i < iMax; ++i)
   {
      std::cout << " " << static_cast<unsigned int>(
                              static_cast<unsigned short>(wtext[i])
                              );
   }

   std::cout << std::endl << std::endl ;

   return 0;
}

outputs the following text:

sizeof(char)    : 1
text            : olé
sizeof(text)    : 5
strlen(text)    : 4
text(bytes)     : 111 108 195 169

sizeof(wchar_t) : 4
wtext           : UNABLE TO CONVERT NATIVELY.
wtext           : ol�
sizeof(wtext)   : 16
wcslen(wtext)   : 3
wtext(bytes)    : 111 108 233

You'll see the "olé" text in char is really constructed by four chars: 110, 108, 195 and 169 (not counting the trailing zero). (I'll let you study the wchar_t code as an exercise)

So, when working with a char on Linux, you should usually end up using Unicode without even knowing it. And as std::string works with char, so std::string is already unicode-ready.

Note that std::string, like the C string API, will consider the "olé" string to have 4 characters, not three. So you should be cautious when truncating/playing with unicode chars because some combination of chars is forbidden in UTF-8.

On Windows?

On Windows, this is a bit different. Win32 had to support a lot of application working with char and on different charsets/codepages produced in all the world, before the advent of Unicode.

So their solution was an interesting one: If an application works with char , then the char strings are encoded/printed/shown on GUI labels using the local charset/codepage on the machine. For example, "olé" would be "olé" in a french-localized Windows, but would be something différent on an cyrillic-localized Windows ("olй" if you use Windows-1251). Thus, "historical apps" will usually still work the same old way.

For Unicode based applications, Windows uses wchar_t , which is 2-bytes wide, and is encoded in UTF-16, which is Unicode encoded on 2-bytes characters (or at the very least, the mostly compatible UCS-2, which is almost the same thing IIRC).

Applications using char are said "multibyte" (because each glyph is composed of one or more char s), while applications using wchar_t are said "widechar" (because each glyph is composed of one or two wchar_t . See MultiByteToWideChar and WideCharToMultiByte Win32 conversion API for more info.

Thus, if you work on Windows, you badly want to use wchar_t (unless you use a framework hiding that, like GTK+ or QT...). The fact is that behind the scenes, Windows works with wchar_t strings, so even historical applications will have their char strings converted in wchar_t when using API like SetWindowText (low level API function to set the label on a Win32 GUI).

Memory issues?

UTF-32 is 4 bytes per characters, so there is no much to add, if only that a UTF-8 text and UTF-16 text will always use less or the same amount of memory than an UTF-32 text (and usually less).

If there is a memory issue, then you should know than for most western languages, UTF-8 text will use less memory than the same UTF-16 one.

Still, for other languages (chinese, japanese, etc.), the memory used will be either the same, or larger for UTF-8 than for UTF-16.

All in all, UTF-16 will mostly use 2 bytes per characters (unless you're dealing with some kind of esoteric language glyphs (Klingon? Elvish?), while UTF-8 will spend from 1 to 4 bytes.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8#Compared_to_UTF-16 for more info.

Conclusion

1. When I should use std::wstring over std::string?

On Linux? Almost never (§).
On Windows? Almost always (§).
On cross-platform code? Depends on your toolkit...

(§) : unless you use a toolkit/framework saying otherwise

2. Can std::string hold all the ASCII character set including special characters?

Notice: A std::string is suitable for holding a 'binary' buffer, where a std::wstring is not!

On Linux? Yes.
On Windows? Only special characters available for the current locale of the Windows user.

Edit (After a comment from Johann Gerell): a std::string will be enough to handle all char based strings (each char being a number from 0 to 255). But:

3. Is std::wstring supported by almost all popular C++ compilers?

Mostly, with the exception of GCC based compilers that are ported to Windows
It works on my g++ 4.3.2 (under Linux), and I used Unicode API on Win32 since Visual C++ 6.

4. What is exactly a wide character?

On C/C++, it's a character type written wchar_t which is larger than the simple char character type. It is supposed to be used to put inside characters whose indices (like Unicode glyphs) are larger than 255 (or 127, depending...)

I recommend avoiding std::wstring on Windows or elsewhere, except when required by the interface, or anywhere near Windows API calls and respective encoding conversions as a syntactic sugar.

My view is summarized in http://utf8everywhere.org of which I am a co-author.

Unless your application is API-call-centric, eg mainly UI application, the suggestion is to store Unicode strings in std::string and encoded in UTF-8, performing conversion near API calls. The benefits outlined in the article outweigh the apparent annoyance of conversion, especially in complex applications. This is doubly so for multi-platform and library development.

And now, answering your questions:

So, every reader here now should have a clear understanding about the facts, the situation. If not, then you must read paercebal's outstandingly comprehensive answer [btw: thanks!].

My pragmatical conclusion is shockingly simple: all that C++ (and STL) "character encoding" stuff is substantially broken and useless. Blame it on Microsoft or not, that will not help anyway.

My solution, after in-depth investigation, much frustration and the consequential experiences is the following:

UCS2String ConvertToUCS2( const UTF8String &str );
UTF8String ConvertToUTF8( const UCS2String &str );

The conversions are straightforward, google should help here ...

That's it. Use UTF8String wherever memory is precious and for all UTF-8 I/O. Use UCS2String wherever the string must be parsed and/or manipulated. You can convert between those two representations any time.

Alternatives & Improvements

ICU or other unicode libraries?

For advanced stuff.

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