There are two approaches to add UTF-8 support to any ASCII program. One is called soft conversion and the other is called hard conversion. In soft conversion, data is kept in its UTF-8 form everywhere and only very few software changes are necessary. In hard conversion, any UTF-8 data that the program reads will be converted into wide-character arrays and will be handled as such everywhere within the application. Strings will only be converted back into UTF-8 form at output time. Internally, a character remains a fixed-size memory object.
Most applications can do very well with just soft conversion. This is what makes the introduction of UTF-8 on Unix feasible at all. The C standard library headers to address wide characters and Unicode are wchar.h, wctype.h, and uchar.h.
