Wide char and library functions in C++

Wide Characters

Wide characters are similar to character datatype. The main difference is that char takes 1-byte space, but wide character takes 2-bytes (sometimes 4-byte depending on compiler) of space in memory. For 2-byte space wide character can hold 64K (65536) different characters. So the wide char can hold UNICODE characters. The UNICODE values are international standard which allows for encoding for characters virtually for any character of any language.

Example 1: Size of a single wide character

This program demonstrates how to declare a single wide character using wchar_t to print its value and memory size.

#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
   wchar_t wide_character = L'a';
   cout << "The wide character is: " << wide_character << endl;
   cout << "Wide character size: " <<sizeof(wide_character);
}

The above program generates the following output:

The wide character is: 97
Wide character size: 2

We can see that to make wide character we have to add 'L' before the character literal. But the character value is not displayed in the output using cout. So to use wide char we have to use wcout, and for taking input we have to use wcin.

Example 2: Wide Character Strings using Arrays

In this example, we create a wide character string (array), and print it using wcout alongside a regular character array.

#include<iostream>
using namespace std;
int main() {
   char str1[] = "This is character array";
   cout << str1 << endl;
   wchar_t str2 [] = L"This is wide character array";
   wcout << str2;
}

Following is the output to the above program:

This is character array
This is wide character array

Library Functions for Wide Char

Here, we have some special functions that is used to handle the wide character. It is defined with the header file <wchar.h>: