How can I get one character from cyrillic string c++

Question

I have wstring with cyrillic word. I need to get one letter from it. I found only this way:

wstring line;
wifstream myfile (".../outfile.txt");
if (myfile.is_open())
{
    while (myfile.good())
    {
        getline (myfile,line);
        wstring a = line.substr(0,2); // this gives one first letter
       //....
    }
    myfile.close();
}

Are there better ways to get a letter from cyrillic string?

Answer 1

If cyrillic uses surrogate pairs in UTF-16 encoding, instead of doing this:

wstring a = line.substr(0,2);

you might want to consider doing something similar to this:

const wchar_t surrogate[] = { line[0], line[1], L'\0' };
const wchar_t non_surrogate[] = { line[0], L'\0' };
const wstring a = IS_SURROGATE_PAIR(surrogate[0], surrogate[1]) ?
                  surrogate :
                  non_surrogate; 

The IS_SURROGATE_PAIR macro is for Windows - if you are elsewhere you can do the check yourself by reading up on the macro link and on its accompanying Surrogates and Supplementary Characters docs.