C Pocket Reference

Multibyte Character Conversion

A multibyte character may occupy more than one byte in memory. The maximum number of bytes that can be used to represent a multibyte character is the value of the macro MB_CUR_MAX , which is defined in stdlib.h . Its value is dependent on the current locale. In the default locale “C”, MB_CUR_MAX has the value 1.

Every multibyte character corresponds to exactly one character of type wchar_t . The functions for multibyte character conversion are declared in the header file stdlib.h.

int mblen( const char *s, size_t max );

Determines the length of the multibyte character pointed to by s. The maximum length of the character is specified by max. Accordingly, max must not exceed MB_CUR_MAX.

size_t wctomb( char *s, wchar_t wc );

Converts the wide character wc into the multibyte representation, and writes the corresponding multibyte character in the array addressed by s.

size_t wcstombs( char *s, const wchar_t *p, size_t n );

Converts the first n wide characters referenced by p into multibyte characters, and copies the results to the char array addressed by s.

size_t mbtowc( wchar_t *p, const char *s, size_t max );

Determines the wide character code corresponding to the multibyte character in s, whose maximum length is specified by max, and copies the result to the wchar_t variable referenced by p.

size_t mbstowcs( wchar_t *p, const char *s, size_t n );

Converts the first n multibyte characters of s into the wide characters and copies the result ...