Honestly, I just don't get the following design decision in C++ Standard library. When writing wide characters to a file, the wofstream converts wchar_t into char characters:

#include <fstream>
#include <string>

int main()
{
    using namespace std;

    wstring someString = L"Hello StackOverflow!";
    wofstream file(L"Test.txt");

    file << someString; // the output file will consist of ASCII characters!
}

I am aware that this has to do with the standard codecvt. There is codecvt for utf8 in Boost. Also, there is a codecvt for utf16 by Martin York here on SO. The question is why the standard codecvt converts wide-characters? why not write the characters as they are!

Also, are we gonna get real unicode streams with C++0x or am I missing something here?

c++ file unicode wofstream
Edit
Report