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Asked: 2026-05-24T02:16:33+00:00

Are there any direct consequences of toggling between Unicode , MBCS , and Not

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Are there any direct consequences of toggling between Unicode, MBCS, and Not Set for the VS C++ compiler settings Configuration Properties->General->Character Set, apart from the setting of the _UNICODE, _MBCS and _T macros (which then, of course, indirectly has consequences through the generic text mappings for string functions)?

I am not expecting it to, but since the documentation says “Tells the compiler to use the specified character set”, I’d like to be certain that, specifically, it doesn’t have any influence on how any literal non-ASCII text put into strings or wstrings is encoded? (I am aware that non ASCII literals in the source is not portable, but am maintaining a solution where this is used heavily.)

Thanks in advance.

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  1. Editorial Team

    No, it only affects the macro definitions. Which in turn can have wide-ranging effects on anything from <tchar.h> or the Windows T string pointer types (LPTSTR etc).

    If you use any non-ASCII codes in your string literals then you depend heavily on the way the compiler decodes the text in your source code file. The default encoding it assumes is your system code page as configured in Control Panel + Regional and Language options. This will not work well when your source code file ever strays too far away from your machine. Specifying utf8 with a BOM is wise so this is never a problem. In the IDE that’s set with Save As, arrow on the Save button, “Save with encoding”, pick 65001. Support for utf8 encoded source code files is spotty in older versions of C++ compilers.

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