DirectPlay supports both Unicode and ANSI strings by defining string pointers in a structure as the union of a Unicode string pointer (LPWSTR) and an ANSI string pointer (LPSTR). The two string pointers have different names. Typically, the ANSI string pointer ends with the letter "A". Depending on which IDirectPlay interface is chosen (IDirectPlay2 for Unicode or IDirectPlay2A for ANSI), the application should read and write the appropriate strings from the structure and ignore the other one.