What are TCHAR, WCHAR, LPSTR, LPWSTR, LPCTSTR etc?

Many C++ Windows programmers get confused over what bizarre identifiers like TCHAR, LPCTSTR are. Here, in brief, I would try to clear out the fog.
 
In general, a character can be 1 byte or 2 bytes. Lets say 1-byte character is ANSI, using which English characters are represented. And lets say 2-byte character is Unicode, which can represent ALL languages in the world.
 
VC++ support char and wchar_t as native datatypes for ANSI and Unicode characters respectively.
 
What if you want your C/C++ program to be Character-mode independent?

That means, instead of replacing:

char cResponse; // 'Y' or 'N'
char sUsername[64];
// str* functions

with

wchar_t cResponse; // 'Y' or 'N'
wchar_t sUsername[64];
// wcs* functions

 
You can simply code it:

#include<TCHAR.H> // Implicit or explicit include
TCHAR cResponse; // 'Y' or 'N'
TCHAR sUsername[64];
// _tcs* functions

Thus, when your project is being compiled as Unicode, the TCHAR would translate to wchar_t. If it is being compiled as ANSI/MBCS, it would translated to char. Likewise, instead of using strcpy, strlen, strcat (including the secure versions suffixed with _s); or wcscpy, wcslen, wcscat (including secure), you can simply use _tcscpy, _tcslen, _tcscat functions.
 
When you need to express hard-coded string, you can use:

"ANSI String"; // ANSI
L"Unicode String"; // Unicode

_T("Either string, depending on compilation"); // ANSI or Unicode
// or use TEXT macro, if you need more readability.

 
The non-prefixed string is ANSI string, the L prefixed string is Unicode, and string specified in _T or TEXT would be either, depending on compilation.

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