Sounds like you weren't working with C++'s string API. std::string knows nothing about the encoding of the data it encapsulates and can be used to store anythin

Sounds like you weren't working with C++'s string API. std::string knows nothing about the encoding of the data it encapsulates and can be used to store anything. There are the codecvt functions but it doesn't sound like you're talking about those, either.