Multibyte Character Manipulation Functions

Internationalization (I18n) Issue:

These functions operate upon multibyte characters of type char *. They test multibyte characters in various ways including conversions between upper and lower case. These functions often replace single character manipulation functions as a result of internationalization reengineering. To operate correctly, the underlying char * type must be properly implemented.

I18n Solution:

Use the appropriate equivalent multibyte character manipulation function when reengineering an application for internationalization.

I18n Discussion:

A multibyte character is a sequence of one or more bytes. An example of a multibyte character set is given at UTF-8. Such character sets will alternate between single and multiple bytes to encode each character. These multibyte functions work with the character set of the platform. This category of multibyte functions will appropriately handle the switching between single-byte and multibyte characters within a given character stream.

To convert between wide characters and multibyte characters, please see the Multibyte to Wide Character Conversion Functions.