Here's some code. Only lightly tested and there's probably a few improvements. Call this function to convert a UTF-8 string to a UTF-16 wstring. If it thinks the input string is not UTF-8 then it will throw an exception, otherwise it returns the equivalent UTF-16 wstring.
std::wstring utf8_to_utf16(const std::string& utf8)
{
std::vector<unsigned long> unicode;
size_t i = 0;
while (i < utf8.size())
{
unsigned long uni;
size_t todo;
bool error = false;
unsigned char ch = utf8[i++];
if (ch <= 0x7F)
{
uni = ch;
todo = 0;
}
else if (ch <= 0xBF)
{
throw std::logic_error("not a UTF-8 string");
}
else if (ch <= 0xDF)
{
uni = ch&0x1F;
todo = 1;
}
else if (ch <= 0xEF)
{
uni = ch&0x0F;
todo = 2;
}
else if (ch <= 0xF7)
{
uni = ch&0x07;
todo = 3;
}
else
{
throw std::logic_error("not a UTF-8 string");
}
for (size_t j = 0; j < todo; ++j)
{
if (i == utf8.size())
throw std