Programming Windows®, Fifth Edition

Wide Characters and Windows

Windows NT supports Unicode from the ground up. What this means is that Windows NT internally uses character strings composed of 16-bit characters. Since much of the rest of the world doesn’t use 16-bit character strings yet, Windows NT must often convert character strings on the way into the operating system or on the way out. Windows NT can run programs written for ASCII, for Unicode, or for a mix of ASCII and Unicode. That is, Windows NT supports different API function calls that accept 8-bit or 16-bit character strings. (We’ll see how this works shortly.)

Windows 98 has much less support of Unicode than Windows NT does. Only a few Windows 98 function calls support wide-character strings. (These functions are listed ...