1.4 Choice of in-memory representation of strings

There are three ways of representing strings in memory of a running program.

• As ‘char *’ strings. Such strings are represented in locale encoding. This approach is employed when not much text processing is done by the program. When some Unicode aware processing is to be done, a string is converted to Unicode on the fly and back to locale encoding afterwards.
• As UTF-8 or UTF-16 or UTF-32 strings. This implies that conversion from locale encoding to Unicode is performed on input, and in the opposite direction on output. This approach is employed when the program does a significant amount of text processing, or when the program has multiple threads operating on the same data but in different locales.
• As ‘wchar_t *’, a.k.a. “wide strings”. This approach is misguided, see The wchar_t mess.