How to Open Files with Unicode Filenames in C ?

How to Handle Unicode Filenames in C 's File Stream Handling?

When working with Windows applications in C , opening files with Unicode filenames may present some challenges. The standard library is not inherently Unicode-aware, leading to potential complications.

Unicode Filenames and Standard Library

The C standard library doesn't explicitly support Unicode encodings for characters and wchar_t. This can create issues when dealing with Unicode filenames on Windows, where wchar_t represents UTF-16.

Platform-Specific Solutions

On Windows with MSVC's STL, a constructor for file streams is available that accepts a const wchar_t* filename. This allows for the following code:

wchar_t const name[] = L"filename.txt";
std::fstream file(name);

However, this overload is not part of the C 11 standard and is not available in other STL implementations like GCC's libstdc .

Lack of Portability

The issue with this approach is its lack of portability. The char datatype on Windows is not UTF-8, while wchar_t on other OS'es may not be UTF-16. Consequently, the preferred route depends on the specific platform and requirements.

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