A string literal is a sequence of one or more characters enclosed in double quotes:

 cout<< "hello world"; // "hello world" is a char literal

By default, the compiler assumes a char-based literal. In order to create a string literal of wide characters, you should prefix the letter L to the string:

 L"hello world" // now "hello world" is a wchar_t literal

Note that since the compiler is case sensitive, you must use a capital L.