Interesting. I came to the same conclusion myself a few years ago when converting a Windows app to Unicode. I store all strings as UTF-8, which enabled me to co

Interesting. I came to the same conclusion myself a few years ago when converting a Windows app to Unicode. I store all strings as UTF-8, which enabled me to continue using strncpy, char[] etc. I convert to wchar_t only when I need to pass the string to Win32. I can even change from narrow to widechar dynamically. I use a global switch which tells me whether I am running in Unicode or not, and call the 'A' or 'W' version of the Win32 function, after converting to wchar_t if necessary.