How to best deal with Windows' 16-bit wchar_t ugliness?

Question

I\'m writing a wrapper layer to be used with mingw which provides the application with a virtual UTF-8 environment. Functions which deal with filenames are wrappers which co

Answer 1

I'd do something like #4, but don't generate any output until you're sure the input is valid.

• mbrtowc should decode the entire character. If it's outside the BMP, then output the high surrogate and store the low surrogate in the mbstate_t.
• wcrtomb should store high surrogates in the mbstate_t, then output all 4 UTF-8 bytes if the character is valid.

Answer 2

If you are on windows, you convert between UTF-16 and UTF-8 a whole string at a time using MultiByteToWideChar and WideCharToMultiByte.

While the default mode in GCC is a 32bit wchar_t there are compile switches that change that, and more generally the c & c++ specs don't specify the size of wchar_t - in fact wchar_t can be the same size as char.

If you want to avoid using Windows APIs (in your windows wrapper code!?) then use mbstowcs to convert an entire string at a time.