How is it possible to attach strings to an array.

Answer 1

std::string is just a class that wraps a character array "under the hood".

At its most basic level a string is just an array of characters like this:
char s[] = "Hello world";

Here the string is made up of an array of ASCII characters (which is coded on 1 byte).

But you can also have:
wchar_t s[] = "Hello world"; //"Wide" character array

"Wide" characters is where it gets a bit more complicated (it is system dependent) since now we are now in the domain of Unicode strings - these come in a number of encodings: UTF32 (which is 4 bytes), UTF16 (which is 2 bytes), and UTF8 (which has variable size between 1 and 3 bytes).

Unicode uses any of the above encodings to map "code units" to a "code point" (the actual character). But sometimes even that is not enough, so Unicode defines "graphemes" which is where a number of code points makes up some composite character.

Note that in the Windows x32 bit world Unicode was not that well supported and on earlier MS C++ compilers wchar_t was defined as UCS2 encoding, which was similar to UTF16 (but not an exact match).

Answer 2

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