title: How do I get STL std::string to work with unicode on windows?
body: <p>At my company we have a cross platform(Linux &amp; Windows) library that contains our own extension of the STL std::string, this class provides all sort of functionality on top of the string; split, format, to/from base64, etc. Recently we were given the requirement of making this string unicode "friendly" basically it needs to support characters from Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, etc. After initial research this seems fine on the Linux side since every thing is inherently UTF-8, however I am having trouble with the Windows side; is there a trick to getting the STL std::string to work as UTF-8 on windows? Is it even possible? Is there a better way? Ideally we would keep ourselves based on the std::string since that is what the string class is based on in Linux.</p>
  
  <p>Thank you,</p>