It depends on whether you want to use the encoding specified by the
current locale, or always use UTF-8. The former is a more general
solution and is probably preferred on Unix; GNU/Linux
distributions are
moving toward UTF-8 anyway. However, it's problematic on Windows;
someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that UTF-8 is
never (or rarely) the encoding associated with the system locale on
Windows. So if you always want to use UTF-8, it's probably better to
use a hand-written converter.
This is actually part of my question :) I guess I would prefer to use
the current locale. But I know nothing about other multibyte
encodings,
and so I have no idea whether my code would work for them. For
instance, may I assume that any 0 ends the string?
