Are wide characters string literals encoded in UTF-16LE?

Question

Say I have the following:

wchar_t *str = L"Hello World!";

Is L"Hello World!" encoded in UTF-16LE or UTF-16BE?

Note: I am using Visual C++ 2010.

Answer 1

You can safely assume that any wide character string on Windows uses little endian UTF-16 - see this answer for a more elaborate dive: Can I safely assume that Windows installations will always be little-endian?