4.11 Wide Characters

The problem with the char data type is that it was designed to hold only a basic character set. This is fine for all the American characters, but what about foreign languages? That where the wchar_t data type comes in. It is used to specify "wide characters" which include not only the basic American characters, but foreign characters as well. A wide character is declared just like a simple character:

char simple;   // A simple character
wchar_t wide;  // A wide character

A simple character is declared by putting the character inside single quotes: 'X'. A wide character uses an "L" prefix to indicate that it is a wide character: L'' .

For example:

simple = 'X';

wide = L'';