Hi, no, you can't simply cast it to wchar. I recommend to read this article about unicode under linux: http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-linuni/index.html There are 2 possible ways to deal with utf8: keep it char* and use as simple c-string. Pro: it's simple and you can keep using standard str* functions and it often smaller as wchar string. Cons: some non latin symbols may consume more then one bytes, so strlen will report bigger number as characters there, which can lead to problems with displaying or counting the characters. You can steel do it with mblen, but it's bit pain. Second option is to convert it to wchar with mbstowcs() function. Pro: characters are always fixed bit-width. Cons: you need to convert between utf8 and wchar and you need additional buffer to hold wchar string (you can't do in in-place, because wchar string will be often bigger then utf8 string). For example, if you need or just wont wchar string, you can do something like this: int l = strlen(argv[i]); wchar_t *nbuf = calloc(sizeof(*nbuf), l); if ( !nbuf ) return 1; l = mbstowcs(nbuf, argv[i], l); // mbstowcs may return smaller value as // l if ( l == -1 ) { /* invalid multibyte sequence was encountered */ free(nbuf); return 2; } Regards, Andrej Gelenberg On 03/05/2012 09:19 PM, Krzysztof wrote: > So how to read effectively UTF-8 characters from char* passed as an > argument under Linux? > Should one simply cast argv[n] to wchar_t*? > -- To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-c-programming" in the body of a message to majordomo@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html
