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From: scott@sage.uchicago.edu (Scott Deerwester)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.next
Subject: Wide characters?
Message-ID: <SCOTT.91Jan16135908@sage.uchicago.edu>
Date: 16 Jan 91 18:59:08 GMT
Sender: news@midway.uchicago.edu (News Administrator)
Organization: /Users/scott/.organization
Lines: 33

I'm building an application that will use Unicode characters as the
native text representation standard.  And in stdlib.h are the
following tantalizing function declarations:

    extern int mblen(const char *s, size_t n);
    extern int mbtowc(wchar_t *pwc, const char *s, size_t n);
    extern int wctomb(char *s, wchar_t wchar);
    extern size_t mbstowcs(wchar_t *pwcs, const char *s, size_t n);
    extern size_t wcstombs(char *s, const wchar_t *pwcs, size_t n);

And in stddef.h is the following:

    typedef unsigned short wchar_t;

Looks a *whole* lot like the ANSI C ($31.95 for the book; ack)
definition, but I can't find a reference to these functions
*anywhere*!  I tried things like:

    find /usr/include -print | xargs grep wctomb

and:

    grep -l wctomb /usr/lib/lib*.a

No dice.  Anybody have a clue what these functions are supposed to do?
I'm *hoping* that they do some sort of mapping between something
vaguely Unicode-like and something vaguely ASCII-like.  (Hope springs
eternal...)  Does anybody know?
--
Scott Deerwester            | Internet: scott@tira.uchicago.edu  | ~{P;N,5B~}
Center for Information and  | Phone:    312-702-6948             |
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