\subsection{What is Unicode?}\label{whatisunicode}
-Starting with release 2.1 wxWidgets has support for compiling in Unicode mode
+wxWidgets has support for compiling in Unicode mode
on the platforms which support it. Unicode is a standard for character
encoding which addresses the shortcomings of the previous, 8 bit standards, by
using at least 16 (and possibly 32) bits for encoding each character. This
allows to have at least 65536 characters (what is called the BMP, or basic
multilingual plane) and possible $2^{32}$ of them instead of the usual 256 and
is sufficient to encode all of the world languages at once. More details about
-Unicode may be found at {\tt www.unicode.org}.
+Unicode may be found at \urlref{http://www.unicode.org}{http://www.unicode.org}.
% TODO expand on it, say that Unicode extends ASCII, mention ISO8859, ...
What happens here? First of all, you see that there are no more {\tt \#ifdef}s
at all. Instead, we define some types and macros which behave differently in
-the Unicode and ANSI builds and allows us to avoid using conditional
+the Unicode and ANSI builds and allow us to avoid using conditional
compilation in the program itself.
We have a {\tt wxChar} type which maps either on {\tt char} or {\tt wchar\_t}
Unicode or ANSI strings and which thus makes it unnecessary to ever perform
any conversions in the program). GTK 2.0 only accepts UTF-8 strings.
-To get a ANSI string from a wxString, you may use the
+To get an ANSI string from a wxString, you may use the
mb\_str() function which always returns an ANSI
string (independently of the mode - while the usual
\helpref{c\_str()}{wxstringcstr} returns a pointer to the internal
useful, is wc\_str() function which always returns
the Unicode string.
+Sometimes it is also necessary to go from ANSI strings to wxStrings.
+In this case, you can use the converter-constructor, as follows:
+
+\begin{verbatim}
+ const char* ascii_str = "Some text";
+ wxString str(ascii_str, wxConvUTF8);
+\end{verbatim}
+
+This code also compiles fine under a non-Unicode build of wxWidgets,
+but in that case the converter is ignored.
+
+For more information about converters and Unicode see
+the \helpref{wxMBConv classes overview}{mbconvclasses}.
+
% TODO describe fn_str(), wx_str(), wxCharBuf classes, ...
\subsection{Unicode-related compilation settings}\label{unicodesettings}
You should define {\tt wxUSE\_UNICODE} to $1$ to compile your program in
-Unicode mode. Note that it currently only works in Win32 and GTK 2.0 and
-that some parts of
-wxWidgets are not Unicode-compliant yet. If you
+Unicode mode. This currently works for wxMSW, wxGTK, wxMac and wxX11. If you
compile your program in ANSI mode you can still define {\tt wxUSE\_WCHAR\_T}
to get some limited support for {\tt wchar\_t} type.