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NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | CONFORMING TO | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHONThe Linux Programming Interface


MBSINIT(3)                    Linux Programmer's Manual                    MBSINIT(3)

NAME         top

       mbsinit - test for initial shift state

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <wchar.h>

       int mbsinit(const mbstate_t *ps);

DESCRIPTION         top

       Character conversion between the multibyte representation and the wide
       character representation uses conversion state, of type mbstate_t.  Conversion
       of a string uses a finite-state machine; when it is interrupted after the
       complete conversion of a number of characters, it may need to save a state for
       processing the remaining characters.  Such a conversion state is needed for
       the sake of encodings such as ISO-2022 and UTF-7.

       The initial state is the state at the beginning of conversion of a string.
       There are two kinds of state: The one used by multibyte to wide character
       conversion functions, such as mbsrtowcs(3), and the one used by wide character
       to multibyte conversion functions, such as wcsrtombs(3), but they both fit in
       a mbstate_t, and they both have the same representation for an initial state.

       For 8-bit encodings, all states are equivalent to the initial state.  For
       multibyte encodings like UTF-8, EUC-*, BIG5 or SJIS, the wide character to
       multibyte conversion functions never produce non-initial states, but the
       multibyte to wide-character conversion functions like mbrtowc(3) do produce
       non-initial states when interrupted in the middle of a character.

       One possible way to create an mbstate_t in initial state is to set it to zero:

           mbstate_t state;
           memset(&state,0,sizeof(mbstate_t));

       On Linux, the following works as well, but might generate compiler warnings:

           mbstate_t state = { 0 };

       The function mbsinit() tests whether *ps corresponds to an initial state.

RETURN VALUE         top

       mbsinit() returns nonzero if *ps is an initial state, or if ps is a null
       pointer.  Otherwise it returns 0.

CONFORMING TO         top

       C99.

NOTES         top

       The behavior of mbsinit() depends on the LC_CTYPE category of the current
       locale.

SEE ALSO         top

       mbsrtowcs(3), wcsrtombs(3)

COLOPHON         top

       This page is part of release 3.32 of the Linux man-pages project.  A
       description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can be found
       at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

GNU                                   2000-11-20                           MBSINIT(3)

HTML rendering created 2010-12-03 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface

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