There are various &quot;solutions&quot; to this problem of holding one &quot;character&quot; per instance of a type. If for some reason you don&#x27;t want to use char * (for example you want to find the length of a multi-byte-per-character length string), there&#x27;s <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cls&#x2F;libutf" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;cls&#x2F;libutf</a>