title: Converting from Windows MBCS to UTF-8
body: <p>I have a very large (millions of lines) application which was developed using MBCS (codepage 1252) and assumes all strings are char* and each character is only one byte. We are now expanding our language set and need to move to Unicode. Since UTF-8 works in 1-byte increments, it seems that this would be a good fit. Per the usual, we would like to make this change with the minimal amount of code change. We would not like to change everything to wchar or _TCHAR and have to modify the way every source file is encoded if we can help it. </p>
  
  <p>The only way these foreign characters would be used is if the user entered them in a field, such as name. Strings containing these characters are then saved to files as needed and are not manipulated. The files are read later and the contents displayed. Assuming that no characters outside of cp1252 (ie chinese characters, etc) are used in the source code, do we need to make any changes to the majority of the source code, or can we leave it as char* and just let the possibly multi-byte characters pass through the system until they reach the UI where they are displayed? </p>
  
  <p>The application is developed on Visual Studio 2015 using MFC.</p>