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</o:shapelayout></xml><![endif]--></head><body lang=EN-NZ link=blue vlink=purple><div class=WordSection1><p class=MsoNormal>I guess this is just a matter of taste/habit. Lots of open source libraries that return Unicode content just return it as UTF-8 in a char* (or a std::string in C++. this is typically the case of the nlohmann/json library we use for JSON parsing). If you need to access the string by Unicode character, you can use iconv or <a href="https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/locale/codecvt_utf8">https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/locale/codecvt_utf8</a> in C++ (although the latter has been deprecated).<o:p></o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><o:p> </o:p></p><p class=MsoNormal><br><span style='color:#1F497D'> </span><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D'>You are probably right about taste/habit, especially for projects that didn’t start as UNICODE builds. However, I sometimes think open source efforts do themselves no favours in (seemingly deliberately) making themselves harder to use. Especially to ‘casual’ users like myself.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D'>For instance, nothing in the reference documentation for proj_get_area_of_use suggests that</span> <span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D'>out_area_name returns a UTF string, so if you take it “at its word” and place the result in a char* you get encoding errors for “unknown” reasons.<o:p></o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p><p class=MsoNormal><span style='font-size:11.0pt;font-family:"Calibri",sans-serif;color:#1F497D'><o:p> </o:p></span></p></div></body></html>