mbstate_t(3type) — Linux manual page

NAME | LIBRARY | SYNOPSIS | DESCRIPTION | STANDARDS | HISTORY | SEE ALSO | COLOPHON

mbstate_t(3type)                                        mbstate_t(3type)

NAME         top

       mbstate_t - multi-byte-character conversion state

LIBRARY         top

       Standard C library (libc)

SYNOPSIS         top

       #include <wchar.h>

       typedef /* ... */  mbstate_t;

DESCRIPTION         top

       Character conversion between the multibyte representation and the
       wide character representation uses conversion state, of type
       mbstate_t.  Conversion of a string uses a finite-state machine;
       when it is interrupted after the complete conversion of a number
       of characters, it may need to save a state for processing the
       remaining characters.  Such a conversion state is needed for the
       sake of encodings such as ISO/IEC 2022 and UTF-7.

       The initial state is the state at the beginning of conversion of
       a string.  There are two kinds of state: the one used by
       multibyte to wide character conversion functions, such as
       mbsrtowcs(3), and the one used by wide character to multibyte
       conversion functions, such as wcsrtombs(3), but they both fit in
       a mbstate_t, and they both have the same representation for an
       initial state.

       For 8-bit encodings, all states are equivalent to the initial
       state.  For multibyte encodings like UTF-8, EUC-*, BIG5, or SJIS,
       the wide character to multibyte conversion functions never
       produce non-initial states, but the multibyte to wide-character
       conversion functions like mbrtowc(3) do produce non-initial
       states when interrupted in the middle of a character.

       One possible way to create an mbstate_t in initial state is to
       set it to zero:

           mbstate_t state;
           memset(&state, 0, sizeof(state));

       On Linux, the following works as well, but might generate
       compiler warnings:

           mbstate_t state = { 0 };

STANDARDS         top

       C11, POSIX.1-2008.

HISTORY         top

       C99, POSIX.1-2001.

SEE ALSO         top

       mbrlen(3), mbrtowc(3), mbsinit(3), mbsrtowcs(3), wcrtomb(3),
       wcsrtombs(3)

COLOPHON         top

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Linux man-pages 6.9.1          2024-05-03               mbstate_t(3type)

Pages that refer to this page: mbsinit(3)