How to convert wstring into string?

Question

The question is how to convert wstring to string?

I have next example :

#include 
#include 

int main()
{
    std::wstr         


        

Answer 1

In my case, I have to use multibyte character (MBCS), and I want to use std::string and std::wstring. And can't use c++11. So I use mbstowcs and wcstombs.

I make same function with using new, delete [], but it is slower then this.

This can help How to: Convert Between Various String Types

EDIT

However, in case of converting to wstring and source string is no alphabet and multi byte string, it's not working. So I change wcstombs to WideCharToMultiByte.

#include <string>

std::wstring get_wstr_from_sz(const char* psz)
{
    //I think it's enough to my case
    wchar_t buf[0x400];
    wchar_t *pbuf = buf;
    size_t len = strlen(psz) + 1;

    if (len >= sizeof(buf) / sizeof(wchar_t))
    {
        pbuf = L"error";
    }
    else
    {
        size_t converted;
        mbstowcs_s(&converted, buf, psz, _TRUNCATE);
    }

    return std::wstring(pbuf);
}

std::string get_string_from_wsz(const wchar_t* pwsz)
{
    char buf[0x400];
    char *pbuf = buf;
    size_t len = wcslen(pwsz)*2 + 1;

    if (len >= sizeof(buf))
    {
        pbuf = "error";
    }
    else
    {
        size_t converted;
        wcstombs_s(&converted, buf, pwsz, _TRUNCATE);
    }

    return std::string(pbuf);
}

EDIT to use 'MultiByteToWideChar' instead of 'wcstombs'

#include <Windows.h>
#include <boost/shared_ptr.hpp>
#include "string_util.h"

std::wstring get_wstring_from_sz(const char* psz)
{
    int res;
    wchar_t buf[0x400];
    wchar_t *pbuf = buf;
    boost::shared_ptr<wchar_t[]> shared_pbuf;

    res = MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, 0, psz, -1, buf, sizeof(buf)/sizeof(wchar_t));

    if (0 == res && GetLastError() == ERROR_INSUFFICIENT_BUFFER)
    {
        res = MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, 0, psz, -1, NULL, 0);

        shared_pbuf = boost::shared_ptr<wchar_t[]>(new wchar_t[res]);

        pbuf = shared_pbuf.get();

        res = MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, 0, psz, -1, pbuf, res);
    }
    else if (0 == res)
    {
        pbuf = L"error";
    }

    return std::wstring(pbuf);
}

std::string get_string_from_wcs(const wchar_t* pcs)
{
    int res;
    char buf[0x400];
    char* pbuf = buf;
    boost::shared_ptr<char[]> shared_pbuf;

    res = WideCharToMultiByte(CP_ACP, 0, pcs, -1, buf, sizeof(buf), NULL, NULL);

    if (0 == res && GetLastError() == ERROR_INSUFFICIENT_BUFFER)
    {
        res = WideCharToMultiByte(CP_ACP, 0, pcs, -1, NULL, 0, NULL, NULL);

        shared_pbuf = boost::shared_ptr<char[]>(new char[res]);

        pbuf = shared_pbuf.get();

        res = WideCharToMultiByte(CP_ACP, 0, pcs, -1, pbuf, res, NULL, NULL);
    }
    else if (0 == res)
    {
        pbuf = "error";
    }

    return std::string(pbuf);
}

Answer 2

Solution from: http://forums.devshed.com/c-programming-42/wstring-to-string-444006.html

std::wstring wide( L"Wide" ); 
std::string str( wide.begin(), wide.end() );

// Will print no problemo!
std::cout << str << std::endl;

---

Beware that there is no character set conversion going on here at all. What this does is simply to assign each iterated wchar_t to a char - a truncating conversion. It uses the std::string c'tor:

template< class InputIt >
basic_string( InputIt first, InputIt last,
              const Allocator& alloc = Allocator() );

As stated in comments:

values 0-127 are identical in virtually every encoding, so truncating values that are all less than 127 results in the same text. Put in a chinese character and you'll see the failure.

-

the values 128-255 of windows codepage 1252 (the Windows English default) and the values 128-255 of unicode are mostly the same, so if that's teh codepage you're using most of those characters should be truncated to the correct values. (I totally expected á and õ to work, I know our code at work relies on this for é, which I will soon fix)

And note that code points in the range 0x80 - 0x9F in Win1252 will not work. This includes €, œ, ž, Ÿ, ...

Answer 3

There are two issues with the code:

1. The conversion in const std::string s( ws.begin(), ws.end() ); is not required to correctly map the wide characters to their narrow counterpart. Most likely, each wide character will just be typecast to char.
   The resolution to this problem is already given in the answer by kem and involves the narrow function of the locale's ctype facet.

2. You are writing output to both std::cout and std::wcout in the same program. Both cout and wcout are associated with the same stream (stdout) and the results of using the same stream both as a byte-oriented stream (as cout does) and a wide-oriented stream (as wcout does) are not defined.
   The best option is to avoid mixing narrow and wide output to the same (underlying) stream. For stdout/cout/wcout, you can try switching the orientation of stdout when switching between wide and narrow output (or vice versa):

   #include <iostream>
   #include <stdio.h>
   #include <wchar.h>
   
   int main() {
       std::cout << "narrow" << std::endl;
       fwide(stdout, 1); // switch to wide
       std::wcout << L"wide" << std::endl;
       fwide(stdout, -1); // switch to narrow
       std::cout << "narrow" << std::endl;
       fwide(stdout, 1); // switch to wide
       std::wcout << L"wide" << std::endl;
   }
   

Answer 4

Instead of including locale and all that fancy stuff, if you know for FACT your string is convertible just do this:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>

using namespace std;

int main()
{
  wstring w(L"bla");
  string result;
  for(char x : w)
    result += x;

  cout << result << '\n';
}

Live example here

Answer 5

As Cubbi pointed out in one of the comments, std::wstring_convert (C++11) provides a neat simple solution (you need to #include <locale> and <codecvt>):

std::wstring string_to_convert;

//setup converter
using convert_type = std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t>;
std::wstring_convert<convert_type, wchar_t> converter;

//use converter (.to_bytes: wstr->str, .from_bytes: str->wstr)
std::string converted_str = converter.to_bytes( string_to_convert );

I was using a combination of wcstombs and tedious allocation/deallocation of memory before I came across this.

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/locale/wstring_convert

update(2013.11.28)

One liners can be stated as so (Thank you Guss for your comment):

std::wstring str = std::wstring_convert<std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t>>().from_bytes("some string");

Wrapper functions can be stated as so: (Thank you ArmanSchwarz for your comment)

std::wstring s2ws(const std::string& str)
{
    using convert_typeX = std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t>;
    std::wstring_convert<convert_typeX, wchar_t> converterX;

    return converterX.from_bytes(str);
}

std::string ws2s(const std::wstring& wstr)
{
    using convert_typeX = std::codecvt_utf8<wchar_t>;
    std::wstring_convert<convert_typeX, wchar_t> converterX;

    return converterX.to_bytes(wstr);
}

Note: there's some controversy on whether string/wstring should be passed in to functions as references or as literals (due to C++11 and compiler updates). I'll leave the decision to the person implementing, but it's worth knowing.

Note: I'm using std::codecvt_utf8 in the above code, but if you're not using UTF-8 you'll need to change that to the appropriate encoding you're using:

http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/header/codecvt

Answer 6

You might as well just use the ctype facet's narrow method directly:

#include <clocale>
#include <locale>
#include <string>
#include <vector>

inline std::string narrow(std::wstring const& text)
{
    std::locale const loc("");
    wchar_t const* from = text.c_str();
    std::size_t const len = text.size();
    std::vector<char> buffer(len + 1);
    std::use_facet<std::ctype<wchar_t> >(loc).narrow(from, from + len, '_', &buffer[0]);
    return std::string(&buffer[0], &buffer[len]);
}