Widestrings

Widestrings are strings that use wide characters, enabling representation of Unicode text in environments that adopted fixed-width code units larger than 8 bits. They contrast with traditional single-byte or multi-byte strings and are commonly associated with Windows-centric programming, though the concept appears in other ecosystems as well. In practice, wide strings typically use 16-bit code units, as in UTF-16 or UCS-2, on platforms where wchar_t is 16 bits, while platforms with 32-bit wide characters use UTF-32. As a result, a wide string may be UTF-16 encoded, with surrogate pairs needed for characters outside the basic multilingual plane.

In programming, wide strings are used to interface with system APIs and components that expect Unicode text. In C++, std::wstring stores sequences of wchar_t; Windows API functions that take Unicode text typically accept LPWSTR or LPCWSTR. In Delphi and related languages, WideString is a managed, reference-counted type that is often used for COM automation and interoperability, and PWideChar provides a pointer to a wide character sequence. Some environments also distinguish between a length-prefixed string type (such as BSTR) and a null-terminated wide character array.

Common considerations include encoding reliability, surrogate-pair handling in UTF-16, memory usage, and portability across platforms with different wchar_t widths. When exchanging text between systems that may use UTF-8, explicit encoding conversion is required to preserve correctness.