Unicode and Character Sets

The Microsoft® Win32® API provides support for the many different written languages of the international marketplace through Unicode and traditional character sets. Unicode is a worldwide character-encoding standard that uses 16-bit character values to represent all the characters used in modern computing, including technical symbols and special characters used in publishing. Traditional character sets are previous character-encoding standards—such as the Windows ANSI character set—that use 8-bit character values or combinations of 8-bit values to represent the characters used in a specific language or geographical region.

This overview describes the character set functions and explains how to use them in your Win32-based applications.

• About Unicode and Character Sets
• Using Strings and Unicode
• Unicode and Character Set Reference

For a list of functions that support Unicode under Windows 95/98, see Windows 95/98 General Limitations.