| NAME | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | RETURN VALUE | CONFORMING TO | NOTES | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON | The Linux Programming Interface |
MBSTOWCS(3) Linux Programmer's Manual MBSTOWCS(3)
mbstowcs - convert a multibyte string to a wide-character string
#include <stdlib.h>
size_t mbstowcs(wchar_t *dest, const char *src, size_t n);
If dest is not a NULL pointer, the mbstowcs() function converts the multibyte
string src to a wide-character string starting at dest. At most n wide
characters are written to dest. The conversion starts in the initial state.
The conversion can stop for three reasons:
1. An invalid multibyte sequence has been encountered. In this case
(size_t) -1 is returned.
2. n non-L'\0' wide characters have been stored at dest. In this case the
number of wide characters written to dest is returned, but the shift state
at this point is lost.
3. The multibyte string has been completely converted, including the
terminating '\0'. In this case the number of wide characters written to
dest, excluding the terminating L'\0' character, is returned.
The programmer must ensure that there is room for at least n wide characters
at dest.
If dest is NULL, n is ignored, and the conversion proceeds as above, except
that the converted wide characters are not written out to memory, and that no
length limit exists.
In order to avoid the case 2 above, the programmer should make sure n is
greater or equal to mbstowcs(NULL,src,0)+1.
The mbstowcs() function returns the number of wide characters that make up the
converted part of the wide-character string, not including the terminating
null wide character. If an invalid multibyte sequence was encountered,
(size_t) -1 is returned.
C99.
The behavior of mbstowcs() depends on the LC_CTYPE category of the current
locale.
The function mbsrtowcs(3) provides a better interface to the same
functionality.
mbsrtowcs(3)
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 1999-07-25 MBSTOWCS(3)
HTML rendering created 2010-12-03 by Michael Kerrisk, author of The Linux Programming Interface