You've always had the ability to put utf-8 data in std::strings, but you have to keep track of which strings are encoded. C++11 adds functions to convert to utf

You've always had the ability to put utf-8 data in std::strings, but you have to keep track of which strings are encoded. C++11 adds functions to convert to utf-8 (and utf-16 and utf-32), http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/locale/codecvt http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/locale/codecvt .