String to LPCWSTR in c++

Question

I'm trying to convert from string to LPCWSTR (I use multi-bite).

1) For example:

LPCWSTR ToLPCWSTR(string text)
{
    LPCWSTR sw = (LPCWSTR)text.c_str();
    return sw;
}

2) This returns Chinese characters:

LPCWSTR ToLPCWSTR(string text)
{
    std::wstring stemp = std::wstring(text.begin(), text.end());
    LPCWSTR sw = (LPCWSTR)stemp.c_str();
    return sw;
}

However, they both always shows squares:

Image

EDITED: My code with an edit by: Barmak Shemirani

std::wstring get_utf16(const std::string &str, int codepage)
{
    if (str.empty()) return std::wstring();
    int sz = MultiByteToWideChar(codepage, 0, &str[0], (int)str.size(), 0, 0);
    std::wstring res(sz, 0);
    MultiByteToWideChar(codepage, 0, &str[0], (int)str.size(), &res[0], sz);
    return res;
}

string HttpsWebRequest(string domain, string url)
{
    LPCWSTR sdomain = get_utf16(domain, CP_UTF8).c_str();
    LPCWSTR surl = get_utf16(url, CP_UTF8).c_str();
    //(Some stuff...)
}

Return: https://i.gyazo.com/ea4cd50765bfcbe12c763ea299e7b508.png

EDITED: Using another code that pass from UTF8 to UTF16, still the same result.

std::wstring utf8_to_utf16(const std::string& utf8)
{
    std::vector<unsigned long> unicode;
    size_t i = 0;
    while (i < utf8.size())
    {
        unsigned long uni;
        size_t todo;
        bool error = false;
        unsigned char ch = utf8[i++];
        if (ch <= 0x7F)
        {
            uni = ch;
            todo = 0;
        }
        else if (ch <= 0xBF)
        {
            throw std::logic_error("not a UTF-8 string");
        }
        else if (ch <= 0xDF)
        {
            uni = ch & 0x1F;
            todo = 1;
        }
        else if (ch <= 0xEF)
        {
            uni = ch & 0x0F;
            todo = 2;
        }
        else if (ch <= 0xF7)
        {
            uni = ch & 0x07;
            todo = 3;
        }
        else
        {
            throw std::logic_error("not a UTF-8 string");
        }
        for (size_t j = 0; j < todo; ++j)
        {
            if (i == utf8.size())
                throw std::logic_error("not a UTF-8 string");
            unsigned char ch = utf8[i++];
            if (ch < 0x80 || ch > 0xBF)
                throw std::logic_error("not a UTF-8 string");
            uni <<= 6;
            uni += ch & 0x3F;
        }
        if (uni >= 0xD800 && uni <= 0xDFFF)
            throw std::logic_error("not a UTF-8 string");
        if (uni > 0x10FFFF)
            throw std::logic_error("not a UTF-8 string");
        unicode.push_back(uni);
    }
    std::wstring utf16;
    for (size_t i = 0; i < unicode.size(); ++i)
    {
        unsigned long uni = unicode[i];
        if (uni <= 0xFFFF)
        {
            utf16 += (wchar_t)uni;
        }
        else
        {
            uni -= 0x10000;
            utf16 += (wchar_t)((uni >> 10) + 0xD800);
            utf16 += (wchar_t)((uni & 0x3FF) + 0xDC00);
        }
    }
    return utf16;
}

Answer 1

You have two problems.

1. LPCWSTR is a pointer to wchar_t, and std::string::c_str() returns a const char*. Those two types are different, so casting from const char* to LPCWSTR won't work.
2. The memory pointed to by the pointer returned by std::basic_string::c_str is owned by the string object, and is freed when the string goes out of scope.

You will need to allocate memory and make a copy of the string.

The easiest way to allocate memory for a new wide string would be to just return a std::wstring. You can then pass the pointer returned by c_str() to whatever API function takes LPCWSTR:

std::wstring string_to_wstring(const std::string& text) {
    return std::wstring(text.begin(), text.end());
}