WideCharToMultiByte() vs. wcstombs()

c++ winapi unicode widechar wchar
Greenhorn picture Greenhorn · Apr 11, 2011 · Viewed 19k times · Source

What is the difference between WideCharToMultiByte() and wcstombs() When to use which one?

Answer

Jon picture Jon · Apr 11, 2011

In a nutshell: the WideCharToMultiByte function exposes the encodings/code pages used for the conversion in the parameter list, while wcstombs does not. This is a major PITA, as the standard does not define what encoding is to be used to produce the wchar_t, while you as a developer certainly need to know what encoding you are converting to/from.

Apart from that, WideCharToMultiByte is of course a Windows API function and is not available on any other platform.

Therefore I would suggest using WideCharToMultiByte without a moment's thought if your application is not specifically written to be portable to non-Windows OSes. Otherwise, you might want to wrestle with wcstombs or (preferably IMHO) look into using a full-feature portable Unicode library such as ICU.

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