Convert ISO-8859-1 strings to UTF-8 in C/C++

The C++03 standard does not provide functions to directly convert between specific charsets.

Depending on your OS, you can use iconv() on Linux, MultiByteToWideChar() & Co. on Windows. A library which provides large support for string conversion is the ICU library which is open source.

You can use the boost::locale library:

http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_49_0/libs/locale/doc/html/charset_handling.html

The code would look like this:

#include <boost/locale.hpp>
std::string utf8_string = boost::locale::conv::to_utf<char>(latin1_string,"Latin1");

To c++ i use this:

std::string iso_8859_1_to_utf8(std::string &str)
{
    string strOut;
    for (std::string::iterator it = str.begin(); it != str.end(); ++it)
    {
        uint8_t ch = *it;
        if (ch < 0x80) {
            strOut.push_back(ch);
        }
        else {
            strOut.push_back(0xc0 | ch >> 6);
            strOut.push_back(0x80 | (ch & 0x3f));
        }
    }
    return strOut;
}

If your source encoding will always be ISO-8859-1, this is trivial. Here's a loop:

unsigned char *in, *out;
while (*in)
    if (*in<128) *out++=*in++;
    else *out++=0xc2+(*in>0xbf), *out++=(*in++&0x3f)+0x80;

For safety you need to ensure that the output buffer is twice as large as the input buffer, or else include a size limit and check it in the loop condition.