UTF8

Here's a couple of functions (based on Brian Bondy's example) that use WideCharToMultiByte and MultiByteToWideChar to convert between std::wstring and std::string using utf8 to not lose any data.

// Convert a wide Unicode string to an UTF8 string
std::string utf8_encode(const std::wstring &wstr)
{
    int size_needed = WideCharToMultiByte(CP_UTF8, , &wstr[], (int)wstr.size(), NULL, , NULL, NULL);
    std::string strTo( size_needed,  );
    WideCharToMultiByte                  (CP_UTF8, , &wstr[], (int)wstr.size(), &strTo[], size_needed, NULL, NULL);
    return strTo;
} 

// Convert an UTF8 string to a wide Unicode String
std::wstring utf8_decode(const std::string &str)
{
    int size_needed = MultiByteToWideChar(CP_UTF8, , &str[], (int)str.size(), NULL, );
    std::wstring wstrTo( size_needed,  );
    MultiByteToWideChar                  (CP_UTF8, , &str[], (int)str.size(), &wstrTo[], size_needed);
    return wstrTo;
}