INFO: UTF8 Support

ID: Q175392

The information in this article applies to:

• Microsoft Win32 Software Development Kit (SDK)

SUMMARY

UTF8 is a code page that uses a string of bytes to represent a 16-bit Unicode string where ASCII text (<=U+007F) remains unchanged as a single byte, U+0080-07FF (including Latin, Greek, Cyrillic, Hebrew, and Arabic) is converted to a 2-byte sequence, and U+0800-FFFF (Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and others) becomes a 3-byte sequence.

The advantage is that most ASCII text remains unchanged and almost all editors can read it.

Windows NT4.0 supports Unicode<->UTF8 translation via MultiByteToWideChar()/WideCharToMultiByte(), using CP_UTF8 for the CodePage parameter, but it only works when none of the flags are set for dwFlags (therefore, you need to specify 0 for dwFlags).

Also, UTF8 is not a valid encoding for command line arguments for Windows NT 4.0 or 5.0, and it is not supported on Windows 95.

Keywords          : kbIntl kbGrpIntl kbIntlDev 
Version           : WINNT:
Platform          : winnt
Issue type        : kbinfo

Last Reviewed: January 17, 1998