Wide character
A wide character is a value of type wchar_t representing one character from an extended character set.
Modern C
A wide character is a C character representation of type wchar_t intended to encode one character of an extended character set.
- How it is used
- Uses wide characters to count and process characters represented by multibyte strings.
- How deep it goes
- Works through conversion and state-aware helper implementations, while deferring broader treatment of wchar_t.
- Examples
- Shows separator-width calculation, a wide-string duplication helper, and a character-search helper.
- What you can do after
- Build it from scratch using mbsrtowcs to allocate and fill a wide-character copy of a multibyte string.
Modern C, Third Edition
A wide character is a value of type wchar_t that represents exactly one character from an extended character set.
- How it is used
- Handles individual characters when multibyte strings require parsing, conversion, or character-oriented processing.
- How deep it goes
- Explains wchar_t, conversion functions, parsing state, locale dependence, and implementation portability checks.
- Examples
- Uses mbsrtowcs, mbrtowc, locale switching, and Unicode box-drawing character literals.
- What you can do after
- Apply mbsrtowcs and mbrtowc to convert multibyte input into wchar_t values while tracking parsing state.
Related concepts
- mbrtowcproduced by · mbrtowc is a C standard-library function that converts a multibyte character sequence to a wide character while maintaining restartable conversion state.
- wide character stringpart of · A wide-character string is a null-terminated array of wchar_t values representing a sequence of wide characters.
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