Wide Character Conversions to and from Single-Byte or Multibyte Characters
The character conversion functions examine the CCSID setting for the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale to determine whether single-byte or multibyte characters are expected for the conversion from or to wide characters.
The handling of wide character conversions (to and from single-byte
or multibyte character strings) is dependent on the LOCALETYPE parameter
value specified on the compilation command. The handling depends on
the shift state of the single-byte or multibyte character string.
The mbtowc
, mbstowcs
, wctomb
, and wcstombs
functions
maintain an internal shift state variable. The mbrtowc
, mbsrtowcs
, wcrtomb
,
and wcsrtombs
functions allow the shift state variable
to be passed as a parameter. The second set of functions is recommended
because they are more versatile and are also threadsafe.