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 6.10            2024-05-03               mbstate_t(3type)

Pages that refer to this page: mbsinit(3)