printf("%ls")

[Ioannis Vranos]

Is printf("%ls") for printing wchar_t strings defined in C90, or it was
added in C95?

 

[Walter Roberson]

Is printf("%ls") for printing wchar_t strings defined in C90, or it was
added in C95?

It was not present in C89 -- which has a specific footnote for %s
indicating that no special provision is made for multibyte characters.

 

[Ioannis Vranos]

It was not present in C89 -- which has a specific footnote for %s
indicating that no special provision is made for multibyte characters.

So what is the need of printf("%ls") in C95 since we got wprintf()?

Wan't there any possibility to print wide-character strings or wchar_ts
under C90 directly?

 

[Micah Cowan]

So what is the need of printf("%ls") in C95 since we got wprintf()?

printf("%s") prints a multibyte character string to stdout as a sequence
of bytes.
printf("%ls") converts a wide character string to a multibyte character
string, and prints it out as a sequence of bytes.
wprintf("%s") converts a multibyte character string to a wide character
string, and prints it out as a sequence of wchar_t to stdout (which must
be wide-oriented). The wide-oriented stream will in turn convert the
wide characters into multibyte character sequences before writing.
wprintf("%ls") prints a wide character string to stdout (which must be
wide-oriented) as a sequence of wchar_t.

The only real difference between non-w* I/O functions and the w* ones,
is that the latter are for "wide oriented" streams while the former are
for byte-oriented streams. The results end up being the same, AIUI.

The only thing I can think of that would truly bother me not to have, if
I was forced to stick to pre-C95 code, is the lack of the wctype.h
stuff. That seems pretty important, to me, because without them, you can
convert mbc to wc, but you can't tell much _about_ that wc.

Ah, well.

Wan't there any possibility to print wide-character strings or wchar_ts
under C90 directly?

Yes. Use wcstombs() or somesuch, first. This is what %ls does implicitly
in printf().

(Disclaimer: this is all AIUI. I have very rarely used any of this
stuff, and so there may be major gaping holes in my understanidng. This
is from carefully reading, skimmed (but hopefully relevant), portions of
the C Standard.)