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Asked: 2026-05-28T11:05:04+00:00

I am developing an application that will be primarily used by English and Spanish

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I am developing an application that will be primarily used by English and Spanish readers. However, in the future I would like to be able to support more extended languages, such as Japanese. While thinking of the design of the program I have hit a wall in the UTF-8 vs. UTF-16 vs. multibyte. I would like to compile my program to support either UTF-8 or UTF-16 (for when languages such as Chinese are used). For this to happen, I was thinking that I should have something such as 

#if _UTF8
typedef char char_type;
#elif _UTF16
typedef unsigned short char_type;
#else
#error
#endif

That way, in the future when I use UTF-16, I can switch the #define (and of course, have the same type of #if/#endif for things such as sprintf, etc.). I have my own custom string type, so that would also make use of this case also.

Would replacing every use of just the single use of “char” with my “char_type” using the scenario mentioned above, be considered a “bad idea”? If so, why is it considered a bad idea and how could I achieve what I mentioned above?

The reason I would like to use one or the other is due to memory efficiency. I would rather not use UTF-16 all the time if I am not using it.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    UTF-8 can represent every Unicode character. If your application properly supports UTF-8, you are golden for any language.

    Note that Windows’ native controls do not have APIs to set UTF-8 text in them, if you are writing a Windows application. However, it’s easy to make an application which uses UTF-8 internally for everything, and converts UTF-8 -> UTF-16 when setting text in Windows, and converts UTF-16 -> UTF-8 when getting text from Windows. I’ve done it, and it worked awesome and was MUCH nicer than writing a WCHAR application. It’s trivial to convert UTF-8 <-> 16; Windows has APIs for it, or you can find a simple (one page) function to do it in your own code.

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