Windows® 2000 Device Driver Book: A Guide for Programmers, Second Edition, The

Unicode Strings

All character strings in the Windows 2000 operating system are stored internally as Unicode. The Unicode scheme uses 16 bits to represent each character and makes it easier to port applications and the OS itself to most languages of the world. Unicode is an industry standard (incidentally, the character coding standard for Java). More information can be found at the Web site http://www.Unicode.org. Unless otherwise noted, any character strings a driver sends to or receives from Windows 2000 will be Unicode. Note, however, that data transfer between a user's buffer and the device is not necessarily Unicode. Data transfers are considered to be binary and transparent to the I/O subsystem of Windows 2000.

Unicode String Data Types ...