Unicode and traditional character sets give the Microsoft Windows operating system the means to support the many different written languages of the international marketplace. Unicode is a worldwide character-encoding standard that uses 16-bit character values to represent all the characters used in modern computing, including technical symbols and special characters used in publishing. Traditional character sets are previous character-encoding standards, such as the Windows ANSI character set, that use 8-bit character values or combinations of 8-bit values to represent the characters used in a specific language or geographical region.
This overview describes the character set functions and explains how to use them in your Win32-based applications.