CrerdWriteW storing credentials in Mandarin on Windows - c++

Question

I used the answer here to add credentials programmatically to Windows Credential Manager. The code is inspired by the code in the answer. When I run it however, the credentials in the cred manager show up in Mandarin. I am not sure what am I doing wrong. Would appreciate any pointers. TIA .
For references this is the code I have
#include <iostream>
#include "windows.h"
#include "wincred.h"
#pragma hdrstop
using namespace std;
int main()
{
const char* password = "testpass";
CREDENTIALW creds = { 0 };
creds.Type = CRED_TYPE_GENERIC;
creds.TargetName = (LPWSTR)("testaccount");
creds.CredentialBlobSize = strlen(password) + 1;
creds.CredentialBlob = (LPBYTE)password;
creds.Persist = CRED_PERSIST_LOCAL_MACHINE;
creds.UserName = (LPWSTR)("testuser");
BOOL result = CredWriteW(&creds, 0);
if (result != TRUE)
{
cout << "Some error occurred" << endl;
}
else
{
cout << "Stored the password successfully" << endl;
}
return 0;
}
To ensure there is no default language problem, I manually created a credential from within the credential manager for test.com and had no problems with it. Snapshot of the Cred Manager -

Answer 1

Appearantly, TargetName needs to refer to a mutable array, i.e. not a string literal. It also needs to be a wide string, or else the characters will be interpreted wrongly, in this case resulting in Chinese characters.
The solution is to define a mutable array that is initialized with a wide string, and have TargetName point to it:
WCHAR targetName [] = L"testuser";
creds.TargetName = targetName;
This way, no suspicious cast is needed to make it compile. When you want to input non-hardcoded strings (e.g. from user input or a file), you need to make sure they are correctly encoded and convert appropriately.