std::string _cannot_ be made "always UTF-8". Is that really so contentious?

You can still use it to contain UTF-8 data. It is commonly done.

I never said always. Just add some new methods for which it has to be UTF-8. All current functions that need an encoding (e.g. text IO) also switch to UTF-8. Of course you could still save arbitrary binary data in it.

> That's where the standard should come in and say something like "starting with C++26 char is always 1 byte and signed. std::string is always UTF-8" Done, fixed unicode in C++.

> I never said always

Yes you totally did. And regarding "add some new methods for which it has to be UTF-8", there is no need at all to add UTF-8 methods to std::string. It would be a bad idea. UTF-8 is not bound to a particular type (or C++ type). It works on _any_ byte sequence.

You're right, sorry.

Good point, so maybe the standard should just add some functions that take std::string_view. Definitely not add a whole new class like std::u8string ...