Question

I am trying to send text packets over the network using winsock. However the text is stored as wchar_t and I need to be able to convert the text into byte (char) format for sending over the network, which will then be converted back to wchar_t.

I’ve experimented with using ostringstream and have converted the wchar_t string of mine to what looks like byte format, however when I try to go the reverse I get a load of gibberish.

I can’t seem to find any answers whilst looking online, so any help would be much appreciated.

OK here is some code that I played with.

std::wstring text( ieS("Hello") );
std::ostringstream ostr;
ostr.imbue( std::locale( ) );
ostr << text.c_str();
std::string text2 = ostr.str();

Convert to std::string to get char format.

std::wostringstream wostr;
wostr.imbue( std::locale( ) );
wostr << text2.c_str();
text = oss.str(); // gibberish

Convert back to std::wstring to get wchar_t format…

Answer 1

Your friends here are:

WideCharToMultiByte, passing the code page for UTF-8 as the MB code page.

MultiByteToWideChar, ditto.