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man pages section 3: Basic Library Functions

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Updated: July 2017
 
 

mbstowcs(3C)

Name

mbstowcs - convert a character string to a wide-character string

Synopsis

#include <stdlib.h>

size_t mbstowcs(wchar_t *restrict pwcs, const char *restrict s, size_t n);

Description

The mbstowcs() function converts a sequence of characters from the array pointed to by s into a sequence of corresponding wide-character codes and stores not more than n wide-character codes into the array pointed to by pwcs. No characters that follow a null byte (which is converted into a wide-character code with value 0) will be examined or converted. Each character is converted as if by a call to mbtowc(3C).

No more than n elements will be modified in the array pointed to by pwcs. If copying takes place between objects that overlap, the behavior is undefined.

The behavior of this function is affected by the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale. If pwcs is a null pointer, mbstowcs() returns the length required to convert the entire array regardless of the value of n, but no values are stored.

Return Values

If an invalid character is encountered, mbstowcs() returns (size_t)−1 and may set errno to indicate the error. Otherwise, mbstowcs() returns the number of the array elements modified (or required if pwcs is NULL), not including a terminating 0 code, if any. The array will not be zero-terminated if the value returned is n.

Errors

The mbstowcs() function may fail if:

EILSEQ

Invalid byte sequence is detected.

Attributes

See attributes(5) for descriptions of the following attributes:

ATTRIBUTE TYPE
ATTRIBUTE VALUE
CSI
Enabled
Interface Stability
Committed
MT-Level
MT-Safe
Standard

See Also

mblen(3C), mbtowc(3C), setlocale(3C), wcstombs(3C), wctomb(3C), attributes(5), standards(5)