Locale-Sensitive Win32 C++ Functions

Internationalization (I18n) Discussion:

This category of functions allows access to the resources and features of the Windows operating system. They accommodate single byte, multibyte, and wide characters, with the Generic version of a function mapping to either the narrow (ANSI) or wide (Unicode) version, depending on the #define UNICODE setting. It is best to use the Generic version whenever possible and use the flag for mapping to the desired target platform function.

The narrow version of the function handles the single-byte and multibyte-character strings. However, although these routines operate on multibyte strings, function length arguments and returns are always in number of bytes, and care should be taken to ensure that sufficient buffer size is allocated for multibyte strings and that length returns are used correctly. For example, the number of bytes is not assumed to be the number of multibyte characters. In the case of the wide version of the function, length arguments and returns are in WCHARs, which are 2-byte values. See Locale-Sensitive Length Functions for additional discussion on single-byte, multibyte, and wide-character strings.

In addition, this class of functions operates based upon the Windows language or locale settings. For internationalized software, the locale must be properly implemented for these functions to work correctly. See Windows C++ Locale Functions for more information.

To run a UTF-16 Unicode application on a Windows platforms where the native encoding is not Unicode, such as Windows 95/98/ME, use the Microsoft Layer for Unicode.