Visual C++ - UTF-8 - CA2W followed by CW2T with MBCS - Possibly a bad idea?

Question

I'm using a library that produces UTF-8 null-terminated strings in the const char* type. Examples include:

MIGUEL ANTÓNIO
DONA ESTEFÂNIA

I'd like to convert those two const char* types to CString so that they read:

MIGUEL ANTÓNIO
DONA ESTEFÂNIA

To that effect, I'm using the following function I made:

CString Utf8StringToCString(const char * s)
{
    CStringW ws = CA2W(s, CP_UTF8);
    return CW2T(ws);
}

The function seems to do what I want (at least for those 2 cases). However, I'm wondering: is it a good idea at all to use the CA2W macro, followed by CW2T? Am I doing some sort of lossy conversion by doing this? Are there any side-effects I should worry about?

Some other details:

1. I'm using Visual Studio 2015
2. My application is compiled using Use Multi-Byte Character Set

Answer 1

Even if your application is compiled as MBCS, you can still use Unicode strings, buffers, and Windows Unicode APIs without any issue.

Pass your strings around as UTF-8 either with a raw pointer ( const char* ) or in a string class such as CString or std::string . When you actually need to render the string for display, convert to Unicode and use the W API explicitly.

For example:

void UpdateDisplayText(const char* s)
{
    CStringW ws = CA2W(s, CP_UTF8);
    SetDlgItemTextW(m_hWnd, IDC_LABEL1, ws);
}