Are wide characters string literals encoded in UTF-16LE?

Question

Say I have the following:

wchar_t *str = L"Hello World!";

Is L"Hello World!" encoded in UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE?

Note: I am using Visual C++ 2010.

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited May 23 '17 at 12:28

4

You can safely assume that any wide character string on Windows uses little endian UTF-16 - see this answer for a more elaborate dive: Can I safely assume that Windows installations will always be little-endian?

edited May 23 '17 at 12:28

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answered Apr 22 '15 at 07:47

Johann Gerell

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score 3 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 22 '15 at 08:00

Depends on your editor, VS2010 uses UTF-8 by default :) With a BOM so the compiler can tell. It can be changed, click the arrow on the Save button.

The compiler will turn it into UTF-16LE in the object file, there are no remaining big-endian machines supported by msvc++ that I know of, ARM cores all run little-endian these days.

Are wide characters string literals encoded in UTF-16LE?

2 Answers2