Question on Wide-character

[tomyfreebie]

What exactly is a wide-character? I've tried to read explanation from other sources but I don't really understand what they are talking about. How is it different than a regualar char?

Also what does adding a L to a string (ex. L"blah") do?

Any help would be appreciated, thank you!

[jsmith]

wchar_t (wide character) is used to implement internationalization, because some character sets have more than 256 unique symbols, char isn't a large enough data type.

(So char* is no longer useful for strings, std::string<> isn't either, since it is a typedef for a basic_string instantiated on a char).

I can't help with the L. I seem to recall it in the Microsoft world.

[helios]

L in front of a string literal means that it's a wide string literal. For example: wchar_t *s=L"Hello, World";
jsmith didn't know this? How uncharacteristic of him.

Note that wchar_t is not guaranteed to be of any size, so it could very well be the same size as char.

And 'char *' can be used to store encoded strings. UTF-8 is compatible with 7-bit ASCII and C strings (byte values 0x00-0x7F don't appear only as whole character, never as part of a multi-byte character).

[anders43]

OP you may want to check out the Unicode web site, they go into detail about the different UTF encodings there.

Normally in Windows you enclose your strings with the _T("hello") and with a compiler switch you can select if you want ANSI strings or wchar_t. Normally you would create your own string type based on TCHAR - not sure why MS didn't include 'tstring' in the first place (they got only string and wstring).

[helios]

Do you realize you can declare one by just doing typedef std::string<TCHAR> tstring? And the last thing VC++ needs is even more non-standard stuff. The fact that it implicitly includes standard headers is bad enough.