Today I was learning some C++ basics and came to know about wchar_t. I was not able to figure out, why do we actually need this datatype, and how do I use it?
Today I was learning some C++ basics and came to know about wchar_t .
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Today I was learning some C++ basics and came to know about wchar_t. I was not able to figure out, why do we actually need this datatype, and how do I use it?
wchar_tis intended for representing text in fixed-width, multi-byte encodings; sincewchar_tis usually 2 bytes in size it can be used to represent text in any 2-byte encoding. It can also be used for representing text in variable-width multi-byte encodings of which the most common is UTF-16.On platforms where
wchar_tis 4 bytes in size it can be used to represent any text using UCS-4 (Unicode), but since on most platforms it’s only 2 bytes it can only represent Unicode in a variable-width encoding (usually UTF-16). It’s more common to usecharwith a variable-width encoding e.g. UTF-8 or GB 18030.About the only modern operating system to use
wchar_textensively is Windows; this is because Windows adopted Unicode before it was extended past U+FFFF and so a fixed-width 2-byte encoding (UCS-2) appeared sensible. Now UCS-2 is insufficient to represent the whole of Unicode and so Windows uses UTF-16, still withwchar_t2-byte code units.