Actually the best way to deal with unicode in almost all situations is to use UTF-8, and dealing with UTF-8 in C is trivial. For other encodings, well you need

Actually the best way to deal with unicode in almost all situations is to use UTF-8, and dealing with UTF-8 in C is trivial. For other encodings, well you need to decode explicitly (or just go for wide chars). Shouldn't come as a surprise, and not a big deal either.