utf-8 and TextView usage

[ZeeGeek <zeegeek gmail com>]

how to get the contents of a TextView object? I've tried to assign
textview.get_buffer() to a string variable but had no fortune, then I
tried to assign textbuffer->get_text(0) and it worked. is this the
only way to do it?

I've checked the reference that textbuffer->get_text(0) returns a
UTF-8 string, so I used a ustring variable to carry the returned value,
however it didn't print out chinese when I cout the value of the
variable in gnome terminal. Then I tried to declare the variable as a
std::string, and chinese showed up in the terminal. Can anyone tell me
why it didn't work why the variable was declared as a ustring?

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