How to output/Input multibyte symbols?

Question

After a lot of searching I start using that weird code:

ofstream myfile;
    string chars =  "абвгдеёжзийклмнопрстуфхцчшщъыьэюя";
    myfile.open ("alphabet.txt");
    for (int i = 0; i < 66; i+=2) {
        myfile << chars[i] <<chars[i+1] << "\n";
    }
    myfile.close();

But is there really no way to get a wide character out of std::string?

Answer 1

This worked on my machine. My source code file is in UTF-8. The string is in UTF-16. The output is in UTF-16LE.

C++ has gotten a little better over time handling Unicode strings, but still has a lot of room for improvement.

#include <fstream>
#include <string>

using std::ofstream;
using std::string;

int main() {
    auto chars = u"абвгдеёжзийклмнопрстуфхцчшщъыьэюя";
    auto myfile = ofstream("alphabet.txt");
    for (char16_t const* p = chars; *p; ++p) {
        auto c = *p;
        auto cc = reinterpret_cast<char const*>(&c);
        myfile.write(cc, sizeof c);
    }
    myfile.close();
}