Or have a single parameter type / single overload accepting any of those string representations.   Some adapter type. Or too slow/too much memory, not enough control?   Would at least make it easy for the user and for the documentation (no overload set).   -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht----- Von:David Brown via Std-Proposals <std-proposals_at_[hidden]> suppose the C++ standard library introduces a new class "foo" that can take a string in its constructor, and also provides methods for viewing the string.  For the C++ <filesystem> classes, the classes all need to handle input of 5 different string types, and have 5 different observers to see the string.  People using it have 5 times the options, and stack overflow gets questions from people wondering if they need string or u8string, or if they should use wstring or u16string. You, as the implementer of a library that uses UTF-16 internally, can happily use the u16string versions. What I would like to see is that "foo" can /only/ take UTF-8 strings.