Edit Question - KnowledgeHub

Title Body

I'm primarily interested in the Unix-like systems (e.g., portable POSIX) as it seems like Windows does strange things for wide characters. Do the read and write wide character functions (like getwchar() and putwchar() ) always "do the right thing", for example read from utf-8 and write to utf-8 when that is the set locale, or do I have to manually call wcrtomb() and print the string using e.g. fputs() ? On my system (openSUSE 12.3) where $LANG is set to en_GB.UTF-8 they do seem to do the right thing (inspecting the output I see what looks like UTF-8 even though strings were stored using wchar_t and written using the wide character functions). However I am unsure if this is guaranteed. For example cprogramming.com states that: [wide characters] should not be used for output, since spurious zero bytes and other low-ASCII characters with common meanings (such as '/' and '\n') will likely be sprinkled throughout the data. Which seems to indicate that outputting wide characters (presumably using the wide character output functions) can wreak havoc. Since the C standard does not seem to mention coding at all I really have no idea who/when/how coding is applied when using wchar_t. So my question is basically if reading, writing and using wide characters exclusively is a proper thing to do when my application has no need to know about the encoding used. I only need string lengths and console widths ( wcswidth() ), so to me using wchar_t everywhere when dealing with text seems ideal.

Tags (comma-separated) Cancel