How do you properly use WideCharToMultiByte

Question

I've read the documentation on WideCharToMultiByte, but I'm stuck on this parameter:

lpMultiByteStr
[out] Pointer to a buffer that receives the converted string.

I'm not quite sure how to properly initialize the variable and feed it into the function

Answer 1

Here's a couple of functions (based on Brian Bondy's example) that use WideCharToMultiByte and MultiByteToWideChar to convert between std::wstring and std::string using utf8 to not lose any data.

// Convert a wide Unicode string to an UTF8 string
std::string utf8_encode(const std::wstring &wstr)
{
    if( wstr.empty() ) return std::string();
    int size_needed = WideCharToMultiByte(CP_UTF8, 0, &wstr[0], (int)wstr.size(), NULL, 0, NULL, NULL);
    std::string strTo( size_needed, 0 );
    WideCharToMultiByte                  (CP_UTF8, 0, &wstr[0], (int)wstr.size(), &strTo[0], size_needed, NULL, NULL);
    return strTo;
}

// Convert an UTF8 string to a wide Unicode String
std::wstring utf8_decode(const std::string &str)
{
    if( str.empty() ) return std::wstring();
    int size_needed = MultiByteToWideChar(CP_UTF8, 0, &str[0], (int)str.size(), NULL, 0);
    std::wstring wstrTo( size_needed, 0 );
    MultiByteToWideChar                  (CP_UTF8, 0, &str[0], (int)str.size(), &wstrTo[0], size_needed);
    return wstrTo;
}