On Tuesday, 7 July 2026 08:04:45 Pacific Daylight Time Tiago Freire via SG16
wrote:
> Correct me if I'm wrong but the internet of std::string is to be "system
> defined encoding" not even superset of ASCII. Ex. on an EBDIC system it's
> just EBDIC encoding. std::u8string is the utf-8 one, and you should just
> use that if your text is utf-8.

That might be the Standard answer from the SG: std::string is the arbitrary-
encoding and anything that interprets the bytes as characters will do so under
the current execution charset, while std::u8string is always UTF-8.

But given the lack of APIs operating on char8_t and u8string, in practice
users will reinterpret_cast back and forth and will store UTF-8 in std::string
anyway. If you own the application, setting the manifest flag in Windows .exe
turning the execution encoding to UTF-8 solves practically all problems too.
If you don't own the application, then you have to deploy your own methods and
functions, in which case you may as well use std::string for UTF-8 too.

-- 
Thiago Macieira - thiago (AT) macieira.info - thiago (AT) kde.org
  Principal Engineer - Intel Data Center - Platform & Sys. Eng.