If you are actually manipulating strings rather than just storing and pushing them around I would suggest looking at ICU. Handling Unicode is difficult and it's

If you are actually manipulating strings rather than just storing and pushing them around I would suggest looking at ICU. Handling Unicode is difficult and it's easy to confuse encodings, code points and glyphs or make assumptions based on your own culture and language. ICU has support for a lot of the basic operations you would want to perform on strings as well as conversion to whatever format is suitable for your platform and environment.