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Asked: 2026-05-27T08:51:42+00:00

I’m having some issues with spanish characters displaying in an iOS app. The code

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I’m having some issues with spanish characters displaying in an iOS app. The code in question is all C++, and shared between both a Windows app and an iOS app. Compiled in Windows using Visual Studio 2010 (character set is Multi-byte). And Compiled using Xcode 4.2 on the Mac.

Currently, the code is using char pointers, and my first thought was that I need to switch over to wchar_t pointers instead. However, I noticed that the Spanish characters I want to output display just fine in Windows using just char pointers. This made me think those characters are a part of the multi-byte character set and I don’t need to go to all the trouble of updating everything to wchar_t until I’m ready to do some Japanese, Russian, Arabic, etc. translations.

Unfortunatly, while the Spanish characters do display property in the Windows app, they do not display right once they hit the Mac/iOS. Experimenting with wchar_t there, I see that they will display properly if I convert everything over. But what I don’t understand, and hoping someone can enlighten me as to the reason… is why are the characters perfectly valid on the Windows machine, same code, and dislaying as gibberish (requiring wchar_t instead) in the Mac environment?

Is visual studio doing something to my char pointers behind the scenes that the Mac is not doing? In other words, is the Microsoft environment simply being more forgiving to my architectural oversight when I used char pointers instead of wchar_t?

Seeing as how I already know my answer is to convert from char pointers to wchar_t pointers, my real question then is “Why does the Mac require wchar_t but in Windows I can use char for the same characters?”

Thanks.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Mac and Windows use different codepages–they both have Spanish characters available, but they show up as different character values, so the same bytes will appear differently on each platform.

    The best way to deal with localization in a cross-platform codebase is UTF8. UTF8 is supported natively in NSString -stringWithUTF8String: and in Windows Unicode applications by calling MultiByteToWideChar with CP_UTF8. In fact, since it’s Unicode, you can even use the same technique to handle more complicated languages like Chinese.

    Don’t use wide characters in cross-platform code if you can help it. This gets complicated because wchar_t is actually 32 bits wide on OS X. In fact, it’s wasteful of memory for that reason as well.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

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