Is it possible to use a Unicode “argv”?

Question

I\'m writing a little wrapper for an application that uses files as arguments.

The wrapper needs to be in Unicode, so I\'m using wchar_t for the characters and strings I

Answer 1

In general, no. It will depend on the O/S, but the C standard says that the arguments to 'main()' must be 'main(int argc, char **argv)' or equivalent, so unless char and wchar_t are the same basic type, you can't do it.

Having said that, you could get UTF-8 argument strings into the program, convert them to UTF-16 or UTF-32, and then get on with life.

On a Mac (10.5.8, Leopard), I got:

Osiris JL: echo "ï€" | odx
0x0000: C3 AF E2 82 AC 0A                                 ......
0x0006:
Osiris JL: 

That's all UTF-8 encoded. (odx is a hex dump program).

See also: Why is it that UTF-8 encoding is used when interacting with a UNIX/Linux environment