Re: TCHAR string?

Daniel,

>> Then what does the "A" stands for at the end of Windows API functions
>> that accept non-Unicode strings?
>
> According to Microsoft's documentation the 'A' functions are "ANSI"
> rather than "Unicode" -- but that doesn't mean that "ANSI" is actually
> the right term to use.

Well, if it's close enough for the designers of Windows, I guess it's close
enough for me.

> The 'A' Windows API functions are used in "MBCS" builds, which tells us
> that they're intended to be used for multibyte (as well as single-byte)
> encodings that are based on narrow chars, so the 'A' suffix is a bit
> misleading ... I don't know how well the 'A' funtions perfom if you
> actually call them with multibyte sequences representing characters with
> codes greater than 255 (e.g. UTF-8) -- I tend to regard "MBCS" as a
> misspelling of "SBCS" and use Unicode if I need to encode anything
> outside the scope of ISO 8859-1.

Except of course, that not all versions of Windows support Unicode.

> This is very all a great pity, as conventional wisdom states that
> character string manipulation in programs is a hell of alot easier if all
> the characters are the same size in storage. What we really need is a
> 32-bit wchar.

Indeed.

--
Jonathan Wood
SoftCircuits
http://www.softcircuits.com


.

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