While I was looking for projects to contribute to on GitHub I remembered VaRest was on GitHub. I headed over to VaRest's repo and was looking at issues. I found the issue and so I went on my way of finding a solution.
My solution for encoding was to convert the input string to utf8 and then encode. My solution for decoding was practically the same, I convert the string to a tchar from utf8, decode, and then output the result. Pretty easy right? Yeah no this solution took me about an hour and I had to get some assistance from an acquaintance, because the encoding was adding extra chars on the end and some other random issues.
until next time