Extending from this questions about locales
And described in this question: What I really wanted to do was install a codecvt facet into the locale that understands UTF-16 files.
I could write my own. But I am not a UTF expert and as such I am sure I would get it nearly correct; but it would break at the most inconvenient time. So I was wondering if there are any resources (on the web) of pre-build codecvt (or other) facets that can be used from C++ that are peer reviewed and tested?
The reason is the default locale (on my system MAC OS X 10.6) when reading a file just converts 1 byte to 1 wchar_t with no conversion. Thus UTF-16 encoded files are converted into wstrings that contain lots of null ('\0') characters.
I'm not sure if by "resources on the Web" you meant available free of cost, but there is the Dinkumware Conversions Library that sounds like it will fit your needs—provided that the library can be integrated into your compiler suite.
The codecvt types are described in the section Code Conversions.