Alf P. Steinbach wrote:
This difference in conversion & wrapping effort was the reason that I used both the standard library and the OS API in my original example.
Using the OS API makes your program non-portable, so it's not clear what the example is supposed to demonstrate. You may as well stick to wchar_t; Windows 95 is ancient history and the whole wrapping effort is completely unnecessary. The portable version of your example would be something along the lines of: #include "message_box.hpp" #include <stdio.h> int main() { char buffer[ 80 ]; sprintf( buffer, "The answer is %d!", 6*7 ); message_box( buffer, "Title", mb_icon_information ); } where message_box has implementations for the various OSes the program supports. On Windows, it will utf8_decode its arguments and call MessageBoxW. A localizable version would not embed readable texts: #include "message_box.hpp" #include "get_text.hpp" #include <stdio.h> int main() { char buffer[ 80 ]; // ignore buffer overflow for now sprintf( buffer, get_text( "the_answer_is" ).c_str(), 6*7 ); message_box( buffer, get_text( "title" ), mb_icon_information ); } Now get_text may return something in Chinese (UTF-8 encoded) and it will all work. It's also possible to use wchar_t for human-readable text throughout the code base - this provides a layer of type safety. You'll have to replace sprintf with swprintf then. Paths, however, are better kept as char[].