Convert const char* to wstring

I recommend you using std::string instead of C-style strings (char*) wherever possible. You can create std::string object from const char* by simple passing it to its constructor.

Once you have std::string, you can create simple function that will convert std::string containing multi-byte UTF-8 characters to std::wstring containing UTF-16 encoded points (16bit representation of special characters from std::string).

There are more ways how to do that, here's the way by using MultiByteToWideChar function:

std::wstring s2ws(const std::string& str)
{
    int size_needed = MultiByteToWideChar(CP_UTF8, 0, &str[0], (int)str.size(), NULL, 0);
    std::wstring wstrTo( size_needed, 0 );
    MultiByteToWideChar(CP_UTF8, 0, &str[0], (int)str.size(), &wstrTo[0], size_needed);
    return wstrTo;
}

Check these questions too:
Mapping multibyte characters to their unicode point representation
Why use MultiByteToWideCharArray to convert std::string to std::wstring?

AFAIK this works only from C++11 and above:

#include <codecvt>

// ...

std::wstring stringToWstring(const std::string& t_str)
{
    //setup converter
    typedef std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t> convert_type;
    std::wstring_convert<convert_type, wchar_t> converter;

    //use converter (.to_bytes: wstr->str, .from_bytes: str->wstr)
    return converter.from_bytes(t_str);
}

Reference answer

Update

As indicated in the comments, <codecvt> seems to be deprecated in C++17. See here: Deprecated header <codecvt> replacement

You can convert char string to wstring directly as following code:

char buf1[] = "12345678901234567890";
wstring ws(&buf1[0], &buf1[20]);