Question

I’m using the win32 api for C in my program to read from a serial port, it seems to be pretty low level stuff. Assuming that there is no better way of reading from a serial port, the CreateFile function involves a LPCWSTR argument, I’ve read and it looks like LPCWSTR is a wchar_t type. Firstly, I don’t really understand the difference between wchar and char, I’ve read stuff about ansi and unicode, but I don’t really know how it applies to my situation.

My program uses a main function, not wmain, and needs to get an argument from the command line and store it in a wchar_t variable. Now I know I could do this if I just made the string up on the spot;

wchar_t variable[1024];
swprintf(variable,1024,L"%s",L"randomstringETC");

Because it looks like the L converts char arrays to wchar arrays. However it does not work when I do;

wchar_t variable[1024];
swprintf(variable,1024,L"%s",Largv[1]);

obviously because it’s a syntax error. I guess my question is, is there an easy way to convert normal strings to wchar_t strings?

Or is there a way to avoid this Unicode stuff completely and read from serial another way using C on windows..

Answer 1

The L thing is only for string literals.

You need to convert argv string (presumably unsigned char) to wchar by using something like the winapi mbstowcs() function.