 <p>I found a working solution which was rather simple, all I did was use the <code>std::wifstream</code> as the first parameter of the <code>boost::property_tree::read_xml</code> method.</p> <p>Basically three lines of code:</p> <pre><code>boost::property_tree::wptree pt; std::wifstream f(L"C:/äöå/file.xml"); boost::property_tree::read_xml(f, pt); </code></pre>