title: Read UTF8 files on windows and linux through c++
body: <p>I have some text files which are encoded using UTF-8. Is there a way to read them using c++ stream classes (wifstream for example)?</p>
  
  <p>I have seen some external references like boost and some codeproject code snippets. But, I dont want to use that just for this purpose.</p>
  
  <p>On linux it somehow works by calling imbue(std::locale("en_US")) but not on windows. I think the problem is that window assumes wifstream to be a UTF-16 encoded stream. Can't I specify the unicode encoding with wifstream class somehow so that it uses UTF-8 not UTF-16?</p>