I’ve been struggling through unicode support in C++, and am getting strange behaviour. If I load a line of unicode text from file, I can store it inside a regular string and output it to stdout without problems. But if I use a unicode string literal with the exact same characters, I have to store it in a wstring and it fails to output properly. Why?

Why is it possible to get unicode in a string instead of needing a wstring? Why does it cout correctly and wstring fails to wcout?

#include <fstream>
#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main(int argc,
         char* argv[])
{
    ifstream infile("unicode.txt");
    string strFromFile;
    getline(infile, strFromFile);
    infile.close();
    cout << "From file: " << strFromFile << endl;

    wstring strLiteral = L"ĀƁĊĐĒƑĢĦĪĴĶŁΜŊŌƤǬŖŞŦŪƲŴΧɎƵāƂċđēƒġħıĵķłɱŋōƥǭŗşŧūνŵχɏƶ";
    wcout << "From literal: " << strLiteral << endl;

    return 0;
}

And the output:

From file: ĀƁĊĐĒƑĢĦĪĴĶŁΜŊŌƤǬŖŞŦŪƲŴΧɎƵāƂċđēƒġħıĵķłɱŋōƥǭŗşŧūνŵχɏƶ
From literal: �
�"&*46A�JL��V^fj�t�N��
                      �!'157BqKM��W_gk�u�O�

I compiled this example with:

g++ main.cpp -Wall

And my compiler is:

g++ (Ubuntu 13.2.0-4ubuntu3) 13.2.0