> So, modulo bad implementation, you should be able to do basic unicode string handling in ISO C++. The locale stuff has been intentionally left vague. So: (

> So, modulo bad implementation, you should be able to do basic unicode string handling in ISO C++. The locale stuff has been intentionally left vague. So: (1) assuming that your implementation supports passing a char16_t or char32_t to the functions in <locale>, you're guaranteed it will do the right thing as far as Unicode and the C++ standard (although, there are some well-known problems with what the C++ standard defines the "right thing" top be for lowercasing epsilon -- since in Greek, there are two lowercase forms of epsilon, and the C++ standard doesn't provide the function enough information to decide between those two forms -- and for uppercasing ẞ (LATIN CAPITAL LETTER SHARP S) -- because in German the uppercase form takes two letters, and the C++ standard assumes doesn't allow for that). The fun part is that plain char's can be encoded in several different ways, and not all have anything to do with Unicode. So you need to have a Unicode-aware locale for the functions in <locale> to do anything sensible with Unicode. Of course, that's something of a tautology, but I'm not sure what the standard requires for locales. So, yes, if your implementation is Unicode aware, you can call a standard C++ function to get what you want, but be sure to call the right one. There's another, with the same name, that isn't guaranteed to do what you want.