About Unicode and Character Sets

Because the world's character-based data has been developed using both Unicode and traditional characters sets, the Win32 application programming interface (API) provides character set functions that help Win32-based applications convert the character-based data from its original character set to Unicode or another traditional character set. Because not all operating systems support Unicode, these character set functions also help Win32-based applications create character-based data that may be transferred to and used on any operating system.

For details about Unicode beyond the scope of this overview, see The Unicode™ Standard: Worldwide Character Encoding, Version 1.0, Volumes 1 and 2, Addison-Wesley Publishing Company: 1991, 1992, ISBN 0201567881.