I need to read in a standard ascii style string with unicode escaping and convert it into a std::string containing the utf8 encoded equivalent. So for example "\u03a0" (a std::string with 6 characters) should be converted into the std::string with two characters, 0xce, 0xa0 respectively, in raw binary.
Would be most happy if there's a simple answer using icu or boost but I haven't been able to find one.
(This is similar to Convert a Unicode string to an escaped ASCII string, but NB that I ultimately need to arrive at the UTF8 encoding. If we can use the Unicode as an intermediate step that's fine.)