C++ developers miss an easy and portable way of handling Unicode encoded
strings. The original C++ Standard (known as C++98 or C++03) is Unicode
agnostic. C++11 provides some support for Unicode on core language and library
level: u8, u, and U character and string literals, char16_t and char32_t
character types, u16string and u32string library classes, and codecvt support
for conversions between Unicode encoding forms. In the meantime, developers use
third party libraries like ICU, OS specific capabilities, or simply roll out
their own solutions.

In order to easily handle UTF-8 encoded Unicode strings, I came up with a small,
C++98 compatible generic library. For anybody used to work with STL algorithms
and iterators, it should be easy and natural to use. The code is freely
available for any purpose - check out the license. The library has been used a
lot in the past ten years both in commercial and open-source projects and is
considered feature-complete now. If you run into bugs or performance issues,
please let me know and I'll do my best to address them.