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No Classic LabVIEW doesn't and it never will. It assumes a string to be in whatever encoding the current user session has. That's for most LabVIEW installations out there codepage 1252 (over 90% of LabVIEW installations run on Windows and most of them on Western Windows installations). When LabVIEW classic was developed (around end of the 80ies of the last century codepages was the best thing out there that could be used for different installations and Unicode didn't even exist. The first Unicode proposal is from 1988 and proposed a 16 bit Unicode alphabet. Microsoft was in fact an early adaptor and implemented it for its Windows NT system as 16 bit encoding based on this standard. Only in 1996 was Unicode 2.0 released which extended the Unicode character space to 21 bits. LabVIEW does support so called multibyte character encodings as used for many Asian codepages and on systems like Linux where nowadays UTF-8 (in principle also simply a multibyte encoding) is the standard user encoding it supports that too as this is transparent in the underlaying C runtime. Windows doesn't let you set your ANSI codepage to UTF-8 however, otherwise LabVIEW would use that too (although I would expect that there could be some artefacts somewhere from assumptions LabVIEW does when calling certain Windows APIs that might not match how Microsoft would have implemented the UTF-8 emulation for its ANSI codepage. By the time the Unicode standard was mature and the various implementations on the different platforms were more or less working LabVIEW's 8-bit character encoding based on the standard encoding was so deeply engrained that full support for Unicode had turned into a major project of its own. There were several internal projects to work towards that which eventually turned into a normally hidden Unicode feature that can be turned on through an INI token. The big problem with that was that the necessary changes touched just about every code in LabVIEW somehow and hence this Unicode feature is not always producing consistent results for every code path. Also there are many unsolved issues where the internal LabVIEW strings need to connect to external interfaces. Most instruments for instance won't understand UTF-8 in any way although that problem is one of the smaller ones as the used character set is usually strictly limited to ASCII 7-bit and there the UTF-8 standard is basically byte for byte compatible. So you can dig up the INI key and turn Unicode in LabVIEW on. It will give extra properties for all control elements to set them to use Unicode text interpretation for almost all text (sub)elements instead but the support doesn't for instance extend to paths and many other internal facilities unless the underlaying encoding is already set to UTF-8. Also strings in VIs while stored as UTF-8 are not flagged as such as non Unicode enabled LabVIEW versions couldn't read them, creating the same problem you have with VIs stored on a non Western codepage system and then trying to read them on a system with a different encoding. If Unicode support is an important feature for you, you will want to start to use LabVIEW NXG. And exactly because of the existence of LabVIEW NXG there will be no effort put in LabVIEW Classic to improve its Unicode support. To make it really work you would have to rewrite large parts of the LabVIEW code base substantially and that is exactly what one of the tasks for LabVIEW NXG was about.