What is the use of wide character in C++?

What is the use of wide character in C++?

wchar_t is a wide character. It is used to represent characters which require more memory to represent them than a regular char . It is, for example, widely used in the Windows API. However, the size of a wchar_t is implementation-dependant and not guaranteed to be larger than char .

What is wide character type?

A wide character is a 2-byte multilingual character code. Any character in use in modern computing worldwide, including technical symbols and special publishing characters, can be represented according to the Unicode specification as a wide character.

How do you declare a wide character in C++?

Just like the type for character constants is char, the type for wide character is wchar_t. This data type occupies 2 or 4 bytes depending on the compiler being used. Mostly the wchar_t datatype is used when international languages like Japanese are used.

What is a wide character literal?

A wide string literal is a null-terminated array of constant wchar_t that is prefixed by ‘ L ‘ and contains any graphic character except the double quotation mark ( ” ), backslash ( \ ), or newline character. A wide string literal may contain the escape sequences listed above and any universal character name.

What is the use of wide character?

A wide character is a computer character datatype that generally has a size greater than the traditional 8-bit character. The increased datatype size allows for the use of larger coded character sets.

What is the range of wide character?

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.

What is wide character C++?

What is wide string in C++?

Windows represents Unicode characters using UTF-16 encoding, in which each character is encoded as a 16-bit value. UTF-16 characters are called wide characters, to distinguish them from 8-bit ANSI characters. The Visual C++ compiler supports the built-in data type wchar_t for wide characters.

What is wide character string?

A wide character-string value is a sequence of double-byte characters or byte-pairs. The number of byte-pairs in a wide character string or sequence is called the length of the string or sequence. In Open PL/I, the maximum length of a wide string value is 16383 byte-pairs or double-byte characters.

How do we represent a wide character of the form wchar_t?

5. How do we represent a wide character of the form wchar_t? Explanation: A wide character is always indicated by immediately preceding the character literal by an L.