stdout and stderr character encoding

i working on a c++ string library that have main 4 classes that deals with ASCII, UTF8, UTF16, UTF32 strings, every class has Print function that format an input string and print the result to 开发者_StackOverflow社区stdout or stderr. my problem is i don't know what is the default character encoding for those streams.

for now my classes work in windows, later i'll add support for mac and linux so if you know anything about those stream encoding i'll appreciate it.

so my question is: what is the default encoding for stdout and stderr and can i change that encoding later and if so what would happens to data stored there?

thank you.

stdout and stderr use "C" locale. "C" locale is netural, and in most system translated into the current user's locale. You can force the program to use a specific locale using setlocale function:

// Set all categories and return "English_USA.1252"
setlocale( LC_ALL, "English" );
// Set only the LC_MONETARY category and return "French_France.1252"
setlocale( LC_MONETARY, "French" );
setlocale( LC_ALL, NULL );

The locale strings supported are system and compiler specific. Only "C" and "" are required to be supported.

http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/clibrary/clocale/

You might take a look at this SO answer (most upvoted answer).

This is not exactly your question, but it is surely related and gives a lot of useful information.

I'm not expert here, but I guess we can assume you should use std::cout whenever you use std::string and std::wcout whenever you use std::wstring.