Convert char* to wchar* in C

Question

I would like to convert a char* string to a wchar* string in C.

I have found many answers, but most of them are for C++. Could you help me?

Thanks.

What is the original encoding in your char*? UTF8? ANSI? What is the sizeof(wchar) on your system and what encoding does it rely upon? UCS-2 (16bit)? UCS-4 (32bit)? — Benoit
– Benoit, Commented Jan 28, 2011 at 8:23
@Benoit: Whoa... I thought sizeof(wchar) was always 2, no? — user541686
– user541686, Commented Jan 28, 2011 at 8:24
@Mehrdad: It is not necessarily 2. It is implementation-defined. If programming on Windows, it has a size of two bytes and holds UTF-16, with double wchar_t's for surrogate pairs. — Benoit
– Benoit, Commented Jan 28, 2011 at 8:25
@Benoit: o__O I did not know it's implementation-defined... interesting, thanks for the info. — user541686
– user541686, Commented Jan 28, 2011 at 8:26

Nick Dandoulakis · Accepted Answer · 2011-08-04 11:28:50Z

30

Try swprintf with the %hs flag.

Example:

wchar_t ws[100]; swprintf(ws, 100, L"%hs", "ansi string");

edited Aug 4, 2011 at 11:28

answered Jan 28, 2011 at 8:36

Nick Dandoulakis

43.3k17 gold badges106 silver badges139 bronze badges

Sign up to request clarification or add additional context in comments.

10 Comments

Crupuk Over a year ago

i will try this evening , for now i don't have access to a shell.Thanks

Antonio Over a year ago

@NickDandoulakis I think this answer could be very useful, however I found out that swprintf could have 2 possible interfaces, could you please take a look at this question? stackoverflow.com/q/17716763/2436175

Nick Dandoulakis Over a year ago

@Antonio the interface that requires the buffer length is the portable one.

Antonio Over a year ago

@NickDandoulakis It won't compile on Mingw 4.5.2 for example, so unfortunately is not general!

Octopus Over a year ago

this is a good solution when cross compiling to mingw on a linux platform

|

caf · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-28 11:54:52Z

5

setlocale() followed by mbstowcs().

edited Jan 28, 2011 at 11:54

caf

241k42 gold badges343 silver badges479 bronze badges

answered Jan 28, 2011 at 8:23

user541686

213k133 gold badges561 silver badges933 bronze badges

6 Comments

Benoit Over a year ago

This is OK as long as the input is an ANSI string.

user541686 Over a year ago

@Benoit: Yeah, there's obviously more to string conversion than calling just a single function. But I didn't give any details since I think this is all the OP's looking for...

Crupuk Over a year ago

The imput come from LdapDirectory, so i guess it's an UTF8 ?

caf Over a year ago

@Benoit: There's no such thing as an "ANSI string". This will work if the original string is in the multibyte format corresponding to the currently set locale.

Crupuk Over a year ago

I already have found this function, but i can't use it correctly, i just want to encode a string to unicode to send in a mail subject header. Thanks to you

|

Franky Rivera · Accepted Answer · 2012-11-18 09:35:00Z

what you're looking for is

mbstowcs

works just like the copy function from char* to char*

but in this case you're saving into a wchar_t*

Christoffer · Accepted Answer · 2011-01-28 08:49:50Z

If you happen to have the Windows API availiable, the conversion function MultiByteToWideChar offers some configurable string conversion from different encodings to UTF-16. That might be more appropriate if you don't care too much about portability and don't want to figure out exactly what the implications of different locale settings are to the string converison.

mehrdad safa · Accepted Answer · 2016-04-08 06:39:40Z

if you currently have ANSI chars. just insert an 0 ('\0') before each char and cast them to wchar_t*.

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

Convert char* to wchar* in C

5 Answers 5

10 Comments

6 Comments

Comments

Comments

Comments

Linked

Hot Network Questions

Collectives™ on Stack Overflow

5 Answers 5

10 Comments

6 Comments

Comments

Comments

Comments

Linked

Related