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MULTIBYTE(3) Library Functions Manual MULTIBYTE(3) NAME multibyte -- multibyte and wide character manipulation functions LIBRARY Standard C Library (libc, -lc) SYNOPSIS #include <limits.h> #include <stdlib.h> #include <wchar.h> DESCRIPTION The basic elements of some written natural languages, such as Chinese, can- not be represented uniquely with single C chars. The C standard supports two different ways of dealing with extended natural language encodings: wide characters and multibyte characters. Wide characters are an internal representation which allows each basic element to map to a single object of type wchar_t. Multibyte characters are used for input and output and code each basic element as a sequence of C chars. Individual basic elements may map into one or more (up to MB_LEN_MAX) bytes in a multibyte character. The current locale (setlocale(3)) governs the interpretation of wide and multibyte characters. The locale category LC_CTYPE specifically controls this interpretation. The wchar_t type is wide enough to hold the largest value in the wide character representations for all locales. Multibyte strings may contain `shift' indicators to switch to and from par- ticular modes within the given representation. If explicit bytes are used to signal shifting, these are not recognized as separate characters but are lumped with a neighboring character. There is always a distinguished `initial' shift state. Some functions (e.g., mblen(3), mbtowc(3) and wc- tomb(3)) maintain static shift state internally, whereas others store it in an mbstate_t object passed by the caller. Shift states are undefined after a call to setlocale(3) with the LC_CTYPE or LC_ALL categories. For convenience in processing, the wide character with value 0 (the null wide character) is recognized as the wide character string terminator, and the character with value 0 (the null byte) is recognized as the multibyte character string terminator. Null bytes are not permitted within multibyte characters. The C library provides the following functions for dealing with multibyte characters: Function Description mblen(3) get number of bytes in a character mbrlen(3) get number of bytes in a character (restartable) mbrtowc(3) convert a character to a wide-character code (restartable) mbsrtowcs(3) convert a character string to a wide-character string (restartable) mbstowcs(3) convert a character string to a wide-character string mbtowc(3) convert a character to a wide-character code wcrtomb(3) convert a wide-character code to a character (restartable) wcstombs(3) convert a wide-character string to a character string wcsrtombs(3) convert a wide-character string to a character string (restartable) wctomb(3) convert a wide-character code to a character SEE ALSO localedef(1), setlocale(3), stdio(3), big5(5), euc(5), gb18030(5), gb2312(5), gbk(5), mskanji(5), utf8(5) STANDARDS These functions conform to ISO/IEC 9899:1999 ("ISO C99"). FreeBSD ports 15.1 September 9, 2019 MULTIBYTE(3)
NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | SEE ALSO | STANDARDS
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