Writing UTF-8 files in C++

Let’s say you need to write an XML file with this content:

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< ?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"? >
< root description="this is a na?ve example" >
< /root >

How do we write that in C++?

At a first glance, you could be tempted to write it like this:

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#include < fstream >
 
int main()
{
   std::ofstream testFile;
 
   testFile.open("demo.xml", std::ios::out | std::ios::binary); 
 
   std::string text =
      "< ?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"? >\n"
      "< root description=\"this is a na?ve example\" >\n< /root >";
 
   testFile << text;
 
   testFile.close();
 
   return 0;
}

When you open the file in IE for instance, surprize! It’s not rendered correctly:

So you could be tempted to say “let’s switch to wstring and wofstream”.

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int main()
{
   std::wofstream testFile;
 
   testFile.open("demo.xml", std::ios::out | std::ios::binary); 
 
   std::wstring text = 
      L"< ?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"? >\n"
      L"< root description=\"this is a na?ve example\" >\n< /root >";
 
   testFile << text;
 
   testFile.close();
 
   return 0;
}

And when you run it and open the file again, no change. So, where is the problem? Well, the problem is that neither ofstream nor wofstream write the text in a UTF-8 format. If you want the file to really be in UTF-8 format, you have to encode the output buffer in UTF-8. And to do that we can use WideCharToMultiByte(). This Windows API maps a wide character string to a new character string (which is not necessary from a multibyte character set). The first argument indicates the code page. For UTF-8 we need to specify CP_UTF8.

The following helper functions encode a std::wstring into a UTF-8 stream, wrapped into a std::string.

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#include < windows.h >
 
std::string to_utf8(const wchar_t* buffer, int len)
{
   int nChars = ::WideCharToMultiByte(
      CP_UTF8,
      0,
      buffer,
      len,
      NULL,
      0,
      NULL,
      NULL);
   if (nChars == 0) return "";
 
   string newbuffer;
   newbuffer.resize(nChars) ;
   ::WideCharToMultiByte(
      CP_UTF8,
      0,
      buffer,
      len,
      const_cast< char* >(newbuffer.c_str()),
      nChars,
      NULL,
      NULL); 
 
   return newbuffer;
}
 
std::string to_utf8(const std::wstring& str)
{
   return to_utf8(str.c_str(), (int)str.size());
}

With that in hand, all you have to do is doing the following changes:

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int main()
{
   std::ofstream testFile;
 
   testFile.open("demo.xml", std::ios::out | std::ios::binary); 
 
   std::wstring text =
      L"< ?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"UTF-8\"? >\n"
      L"< root description=\"this is a na?ve example\" >\n< /root >";
 
   std::string outtext = to_utf8(text);
 
   testFile << outtext;
 
   testFile.close();
 
   return 0;
}

And now when you open the file, you get what you wanted in the first place.

And that is all!

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