Wide Character File and Path Functions

Internationalization (I18n) Issue:

These functions operate on wide characters of type wchar_t *, and perform a variety of file system and path operations, including permissioning.

The wide-character string functions often replace single-byte or multibyte file and path 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 file and path function when reengineering an application for internationalization.

I18n Discussion:

Wide character file and path 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 * has a size of 16 bits. On most 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.