wcstombs: character encoding?

Question

wcstombs documentation says, it \"converts the sequence of wide-character codes to multibyte string\". But it never says what is a \"wide-character\".

Is it implici

Answer 1

Wide character strings are composed of multi-byte characters, whereas the normal C string is a char* - a sequence of byte-wide characters. Wchars are not the same thing as unicode on all platforms, though unicode representations are typically based on wchar_t

I've seen wchars used in embedded systems like phones, where you want filenames with special characters but don't necessarily want to support all the glory and complexity of unicode.

Typical usage would be converting a 2-byte based string to a regular C string, and vica versa