Unicode and input method

[Robert Roebling t-online de (Robert Roebling)]

  Hi all,

I have written some sort of text editor
with GTK 1.2 and I have converted it
to GTK 2.0 now. Most things behave
nicely, but I am still unable to enter
any non-ascii characters, because I am
unable to decode the key event. I read
that the "string" part contains the
actual character in "multi-byte" format.
I am surprised to read that this is not
done in utf8, but there is certainly some
reason for it.
Now the question, how do I correctly
decode the string into utf8 or wchar_t
and what is the official way to make
input via (e.g. Japanese) input methods
possible?
I have read the code in GtkEntry.c but
it doesn't seem to handle key press 
events at all, it just forwards them
to an input method filter. I was unable
to see how the char finally arrives in
the GtkEntry widget.

Thanks for any hints,

  Robert

-- 
Robert Roebling, MD <robert roebling medizin uni-ulm de>