Wide Character Manipulation Functions

Internationalization (I18n) Issue:

These functions operate upon wide characters of type wchar_t *. The functions test wide characters in various ways and convert them between upper and lower case. All functions in this category accept wide character arguments. These functions often replace single character manipulation functions as a result of internationalization reengineering. To operate correctly, the underlying wchar_t * type must be properly implemented.

I18n Solution:

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

I18n Discussion:

Wide character manipulation functions handle unique code point values for each character in the character set as specified by the compilation environment. For an internationalized application using the UTF-16 or UCS-2 Unicode character sets, the wchar_t data type has a size of 16 bits. On Linux/Unix platforms, UTF-32 encoding is used, with a wchar_t character occupying 32 bits. To avoid dependency on the size of a wide-character, always use the wchar_t data type and specify character sizes in terms of the number of wide-characters.

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