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Asked: 2026-05-26T11:39:38+00:00

Good Day, I’ve been writing a simple program using the Windows API, it’s written

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Good Day,
I’ve been writing a simple program using the Windows API, it’s written in C++/CLI.
The problem I’ve encountered is, I’m loading a library (.dll) and then calling its functions. one of the functions returns char*. So I add the returned value to my textbox

output->Text = System::Runtime::InteropServices::Marshal::PtrToStringAnsi
                   (IntPtr(Function()));

Now, as you can see this is encoded in ANSI, the char* returned is, I presume, also ANSI (or Windows-1252, w/e you guys call it :>). The original data, which the function in LIBRARY gets is encoded in UTF-8, variable-length byte field, terminated by 0x00. There are a lot of non-Latin characters in my program, so this is troubling. I’ve also tried this

USES_CONVERSION;
wchar_t* pUnicodeString = 0;
pUnicodeString = A2W( Function());

output->Text = System::Runtime::InteropServices::Marshal::PtrToStringUni
                   (IntPtr(pUnicodeString));

using atlconv.h. It still prints malformed/wrong characters. So my question would be, can I convert it to something like UTF-8 so I would be able to see correct output, or does the char* loose the necessary information required to do so? Maybe changing the .dll source code would help, but it’s quite old and written in C, so i don’t want to mess with it :/
I hope the information I provided was sufficient, if you need anything more, just ask.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As I know there is no standard way to handle UTF-8. Try to google appropriate converters, e.g. http://www.nuclex.org/articles/cxx/10-marshaling-strings-in-cxx-cli , Convert from C++/CLI pointer to native C++ pointer .

    Also, your second code snippet doesn’t use pUnicodeString, it doesn’t look right.

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