Difference Between std::wstring and std::string

The main distinction between the wstring and string is the kind of characters they store. Wide characters represents Unicode characters and require more than one byte of storage, are intended to be handled by wstring. Whereas, the purpose of string is to handle narrow characters, which are often characters that fall under the expanded ASCII character set or the ASCII character set.

The below table illustrates the key differences among them:

wstring

string

Character type of wstring is wchar_t

Character type of string is char

It is mainly used for wide characters.

It is mainly used for narrow characters .

It supports Unicode, with most characters requiring more than one byte.

It supports ASCII or extended ASCII characters.

I/O stream used is wcout.

I/O stream used is cout.

It is suitable for multilingual text.

It is suitable for single-byte encoding.

String literal prefix L is used (e.g., L"Hello").

No string literal prefix is used.

Difference Between std::wstring and std::string

The std::wstring and std::string are the classes in C++ used to store sequences of characters. While serving similar purposes, they serve different requirements. In this article, we will look at some major differences between the std::wstring and std::string in C++.

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Wide String in C++

The std::wstring (also called Wide String) is used to represent the string of wide characters. The “w” in the string stands for the word “wide” indicating that it handles wide character encodings, which usually require more than one byte per character. This makes wstring suitable for supporting a large character set, including Unicode characters and characters from various languages....

Narrow String in C++

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Difference Between std::wstring and std::string

The std::string class in the C++ standard library represents a string of narrow characters. It is designed to handle characters in the ASCII character set. Compared to wide character strings, each character in a string usually takes only one byte of storage, making it more space-efficient....

Conclusion

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