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Asked: 2026-05-23T22:05:53+00:00

You can write UTF-8/16/32 string literals in C++11 by prefixing the string literal with

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You can write UTF-8/16/32 string literals in C++11 by prefixing the string literal with u8/u/U respectively. How must the compiler interpret a UTF-8 file that has non-ASCII characters inside of these new types of string literals? I understand the standard does not specify file encodings, and that fact alone would make the interpretation of non-ASCII characters inside source code completely undefined behavior, making the feature just a tad less useful.

I understand you can still escape single unicode characters with \uNNNN, but that is not very readable for, say, a full Russian, or French sentence, which typically contain more than one unicode character.

What I understand from various sources is that u should become equivalent to L on current Windows implementations and U on e.g. Linux implementations. So with that in mind, I’m also wondering what the required behavior is for the old string literal modifiers…

For the code-sample monkeys:

string utf8string a = u8"L'hôtel de ville doit être là-bas. Ça c'est un fait!";
string utf16string b = u"L'hôtel de ville doit être là-bas. Ça c'est un fait!";
string utf32string c = U"L'hôtel de ville doit être là-bas. Ça c'est un fait!";

In an ideal world, all of these strings produce the same content (as in: characters after conversion), but my experience with C++ has taught me that this is most definitely implementation defined and probably only the first will do what I want.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    In GCC, use -finput-charset=charset:

    Set the input character set, used for translation from the character set of the input file to the source character set used by GCC. If the locale does not specify, or GCC cannot get this information from the locale, the default is UTF-8. This can be overridden by either the locale or this command line option. Currently the command line option takes precedence if there’s a conflict. charset can be any encoding supported by the system’s “iconv” library routine.

    Also check out the options -fexec-charset and -fwide-exec-charset.

    Finally, about string literals:

    char     a[] = "Hello";
wchar_t  b[] = L"Hello";
char16_t c[] = u"Hello";
char32_t d[] = U"Hello";

    The size modifier of the string literal (L, u, U) merely determines the type of the literal.

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