Convert old Visual Studio C++ project from multibyte character set

Question

I would like to transfer an old C++ MFC project from Visual Studio 2005 to a newer version. The project uses a multibyte character set that I know is no longer supported in the current Visual Studio. The first step should therefore be to make the project independent of the character set. A colleague at work told me that I can do this if I put a macro _T() around each text. Unfortunately, the project contains a lot of static text and adding the macros should take weeks.

Is there no other way?

Answer 1

There is no other way unfortunately. You can try to automate text editing with regex or some text editor like sed.

But personally I would prefer to check all the code manually that no multibyte char-related code is left: use _tcslen instead of strlen, _TCHAR instead of char, etc.

Other variant to consider is to make code explicitly use widechars: wcslen instead of strlen, wchar_t instead of char, L"some string" instead of _T("some string"), etc.

UPD: also I found some good news "The deprecation warning [MFC support for MBCS deprecated] has been removed from MFC in VC2017 and we will continue to provide MBCS support in future releases." (https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog/2013/07/08/mfc-support-for-mbcs-deprecated-in-visual-studio-2013/), so probably you can just left it as it is.