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Asked: 2026-05-13T06:33:58+00:00

I was going to start with Win32 app development. Before I could get the

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I was going to start with Win32 app development. Before I could get the first window to display i was ready to give up! I was overwhelmed by the number of datatypes you need to know about before you can write a simple WinMain and WndProc. (unless you copy-paste of course!)

Especially these –

LPSTR

LPCSTR

LPWSTR

LPCWSTR

Can someone point me to the right article that explains these with respect to Win32 programming? Which ones should I know about, which ones are needed in what situation, when to go for Unicode, what is multi-byte char set, and all the related stuff.

And the conversion to/from these datatypes to char* and char[] and whatnot, when calling Win32 API functions is a pain.

It is all so confusing.

Thanks for the help.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    The pattern is relatively simple:

    LPSTR = zero-terminated string of char

    LPCSTR = constant zero-terminated string of char (C == constant)

    LPWSTR = zero-terminated string of wchar_t (W == wide character)

    LPCWSTR = constant zero-terminated string of wchar_t (C and W)

    For details and explanations see e.g. http://www.codeproject.com/KB/string/cppstringguide1.aspx

    The linked article also contains advice when to use Unicode in your application and when not.

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