mbtowc - convert a multibyte sequence to a wide character
Standard C library (libc, -lc)
#include <stdlib.h>
int mbtowc(size_t size;
wchar_t *restrict pwc, const char s[restrict size],
size_t size);
The main case for this function is when s is not NULL and
pwc is not NULL. In this case, the mbtowc()
function inspects at most size bytes of the multibyte string
starting at s, extracts the next complete multibyte character,
converts it to a wide character and stores it at *pwc. It
updates an internal shift state known only to the
mbtowc() function. If s does not point to a
null byte ('\0'), it returns the number of bytes that were consumed from
s, otherwise it returns 0.
If the size bytes starting at s do not contain a
complete multibyte character, or if they contain an invalid multibyte
sequence, mbtowc() returns -1. This can happen even if
size >= MB_CUR_MAX, if the multibyte string
contains redundant shift sequences.
A different case is when s is not NULL but pwc is
NULL. In this case, the mbtowc() function behaves as
above, except that it does not store the converted wide character in
memory.
A third case is when s is NULL. In this case, pwc
and size are ignored. The mbtowc() function
resets the shift state, only known to this function, to the initial
state, and returns nonzero if the encoding has nontrivial shift state,
or zero if the encoding is stateless.
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).
| Interface | Attribute | Value |
mbtowc() |
Thread safety | MT-Unsafe race |
This function is not multithread safe. The function mbrtowc(3) provides a better interface to the same functionality.
C11, POSIX.1-2008.
POSIX.1-2001, C99.
The behavior of mbtowc() depends on the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale.