Unicode

D is focused on utf8. Source files are utf8.

Strings

The builtin D type string is just an immutable char array. However, if you iterate over it, dchar code points are returned. Thus the following different lengths.

string foo = "bär";
assert(foo.length == 4);
assert(walkLength(foo) == 3);

Transcoding

Since not everything your program consumes is utf8, the standard library provides the std.encoding module for conversion.

wstring ws;
transcode("hello world",ws);
  // transcode from UTF-8 to UTF-16

Latin1String ls;
transcode(ws, ls);
  // transcode from UTF-16 to ISO-8859-1

As source files are utf8, string literals are utf8 as well. The wstring type is utf16, and transcode identifies source and target encoding from the types of its arguments.