# **[](https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/header/stdmchar)** is a proposed C header (C2y/C3x) designed to fix Unicode handling deficiencies in `` and `` with cleaner, safer APIs. As of C23, it is not yet standardized and compilers do not ship it. When standardized, it will provide portable UTF-8 to local encoding transcoding without platform-specific APIs. ## Example This is a placeholder for when the header becomes available; `` is the current portable Unicode solution. ```c // is not yet in the C standard. // For now, use or POSIX iconv for Unicode transcoding. ```