Windows® via C/C++, Fifth Edition

ANSI and Unicode Character and String Data Types

I’m sure you’re aware that the C language uses the char data type to represent an 8-bit ANSI character. By default, when you declare a literal string in your source code, the C compiler turns the string’s characters into an array of 8-bit char data types:

// An 8-bit character
char c = 'A';

// An array of 99 8-bit characters and an 8-bit terminating zero.
char szBuffer[100] = "A String";

Microsoft’s C/C++ compiler defines a built-in data type, wchar_t, which represents a 16-bit Unicode (UTF-16) character. Because earlier versions of Microsoft’s compiler did not offer this built-in data type, the compiler defines this data type only when the /Zc:wchar_t compiler switch is specified. By default, when ...