A good std::string cross-platform UTF8 alternative in C++11?

Question

I am trying to find a good alternative to std::string in games. wstring doesn't work properly in Android. So far I just use ushort[] with 0-65535 range(2 bytes per character) and it seems to work fine for 11 languages as bitmap fonts but moving forward I'd like to get a better implementation.

u8"xxxyyy" literal notations aren't supported in VC++ compiler yet, what other options do I have?

Answer 1

The path of least resistance is probably to just go ahead and put UTF-8 in std::string objects. You will have to write UTF-8 literals using manually-encoded backslash escapes for anything not in the ASCII range, and you won't be able to use locale, but in my experience locale is useless anyway. I can't personally vouch for its helpfulness, and it's inconveniently huge, but you may find that the ICU libraries have routines geared to this strategy.