Everything you need to know about Windows Unicode Handling if you are a C or C++ developer

Open files when the file name contains Unicode characters

All filesystems supported by Windows since Windows XP do save the name of the files and folders in Unicode format. Regardless of this, both fopen and std::*fstream are strictly unable to open files when given UTF-8 strings containing non-ASCII characters in all current Windows version. Trying to do so will fail.

Solutions for cross-platform development:

• Windows 10 version 1803 and up only: Override the locale in the context of the application to set it to UTF-8 (see Microsoft's documentation about setlocale())
• Use Boost::nowide.