What library to use to work with UTF-8?

Question

C++ / C#

In general, the answer to this question already exists: grigory.info/UTF8Strings.About.html
The problem is that this library is released under the GNU GPL license. I'm looking for a similar library but under a normal license (MIT for example). Without wstring and other nasty things, you just need a unicode-enabled string class. So that the strings of this class can be used in the same way as regular C++ string. Once again I repeat - similar to the one that is available at the link above. Google gives out a monstrous ICU and stuff like that, but I haven’t found something simple like this library.
Also, your own experience of implementing unicode in your projects will not interfere.

Answer 1

Why do you need UTF-8? Using UTF-8 at runtime is at least inefficient, at most stupid.
wstring is a string class that supports unicode.
UTF-8 is not unicode. This is a format for converting unicode characters to 8 bit character sets. They are sooooo inconvenient to work with (even to compare characters, you have to use special functions). To store UTF-8 at runtime, you can use the "normal" std::string.
But for saving to disk, it may be more efficient to convert Unicode strings to UTF-8 if most of the text is written in English. Otherwise, you can save in Unicode, there will be no difference in file size.

Answer 2

If it's Linux:
- if you don't need context lookup, STL find statement, etc., then in C++ string is more than enough for storing and manipulating UTF-8
- if you need lookup and context parsing at all, then it's wstring, wchar_t etc. - this is specially designed to represent Unicode in C++
- if you need some kind of char <-> wchar_t conversion, then for this you have a group of functions "multibyte characters" mb*()
And if you have Windows ... then that's it related to Unicode - through the ass and ... "I mourn with you" ;-)
(in earlier Windows Microsoft took Unicode as UTF-16, in the latest I don't know ... God bless)