What is the use of wchar_t in general programming?
c++
Solution
`wchar_t` is intended for representing text in fixed-width, multi-byte encodings; since `wchar_t` is usually 2 bytes in size it can be used to represent text in any 2-byte encoding. It can also be used for representing text in variable-width multi-byte encodings of which the most common is UTF-16.
On platforms where `wchar_t` is 4 bytes in size it can be used to represent any text using UCS-4 (Unicode), but since on most platforms it's only 2 bytes it can only represent Unicode in a variable-width encoding (usually UTF-16). It's more common to use `char` with a variable-width encoding e.g. UTF-8 or GB 18030.
About the only modern operating system to use `wchar_t` extensively is Windows; this is because Windows adopted Unicode before it was extended past U+FFFF and so a fixed-width 2-byte encoding (UCS-2) appeared sensible. Now UCS-2 is insufficient to represent the whole of Unicode and so Windows uses UTF-16, still with `wchar_t` 2-byte code units.
Problem
Today I was learning some C++ basics and came to know about `wchar_t`. I was not able to figure out, why do we actually need this datatype, and how do I use it?