I'm working on a english only C++ program for Windows where we were told "always use std::wstring", but it seems like nobody on the team really has much of an understanding beyond that. I already read the question titled "std::wstring VS std::string. It was very helpful, but I still don't quite understand how to apply all of that information to my problem. The program I'm working on displays data in a Windows GUI. That data is persisted as XML. We often transform that XML using XSLT into HTML or XSL:FO for reporting purposes. My feeling based on what I have read is that the HTML should be encoded as UTF-8. I know very little about GUI development, but the little bit I have read indicates that the GUI stuff is all based on UTF-16 encoded strings. I'm trying to understand where this leaves me. Say we decide that all of our persisted data should be UTF-8 encoded XML. Does this mean that in order to display persisted data in a UI component, I should really be performing some sort of explicit UTF-8 to UTF-16 transcoding process? I suspect my explanation could use clarification, so I'll try to provide that if you have any questions.