About Unicode and Character Sets
The world's character-based data was developed using both Unicode and traditional character sets. Because of this, Windows provides character set functions that help applications convert the character-based data from its original character set to Unicode or another traditional character set. These character set functions also help applications create character-based data that can be transferred to and used on any operating system, including those that do not support Unicode.
For details about Unicode beyond the scope of this overview, see The Unicode Standard.
This section covers the following topics.