How Do You Handle Unicode?

spectecjr asks: "The word on the street is that Unicode is the panacea for programming globalizable applications. The thing is, which operating systems support it? And how much work do you need to do? Allegedly, KDE and GNOME both support Unicode. Windows 9x supports it, but in a rather fragmented manner. Windows 2000 is Unicode to the extreme, even supporting Dvengali, Thai and Arabic script on all versions. But what are the pitfalls? What do you have to be aware of? What makes it different than talking to ASCII? How do you handle whitespace? How do you make your API display the characters in the right fonts? All of these issues are becoming more important as the world becomes more switched on, and the boundaries shrink between places. But what does it really mean for Joe Q. Developer?"

For some related articles on this subject, you might want to check out the following:

• Are There UNICODE String Literals in GCC?
• Will We Ever Get Rid of ASCII?