Applications with a graphical user interface (and games surely fall into this category) are able to interact with users by displaying text and by expecting textual input from the user. We have already scratched the surface of this topic in the previous chapter by using the QString class. Now, we will go into more details.
Text in Qt is internally encoded using Unicode, which allows to represent characters in almost all languages spoken in the world and is de facto standard for native encoding of text in most modern operating systems. You have to be aware though that contrary to the QString class, the C++ language does not use Unicode by default. Thus, each string literal (that is, each bare text you wrap in quotation marks) that you enter in your code needs to be converted to Unicode first before it can be stored in any of Qt's string handling classes. By default, this is done implicitly assuming that the string literal is UTF-8 encoded, but QString provides...