| MBSINIT(3) | Linux Programmer's Manual | MBSINIT(3) |
mbsinit - test for initial shift state
#include <wchar.h> int mbsinit (const mbstate_t *ps);
Character conversion between the multibyte representation and the wide character representation uses conversion state, of type mbstate_t. Conversion of a string uses a finite-state machine; when it is interrupted after the complete conversion of a number of characters, it may need to save a state for processing the remaining characters. Such a conversion state is needed for the sake of encodings such as ISO-2022 and SJIS.
The initial state is the state at the beginning of conversion of a string. There are two kinds of state: The one used by multibyte to wide character conversion functions, such as mbsrtowcs, and the one used by wide character to multibyte conversion functions, such as wcsrtombs, but they both fit in a mbstate_t, and they both have the same representation for an initial state.
For 8-bit or UTF-8 encodings, all states are equivalent to the initial state.
One possible way to create an mbstate_t in initial state is to set it to zero:
On Linux, the following works as well, but might generate compiler warnings:
mbstate_t state;
memset(&state,0,sizeof(mbstate_t));
mbstate_t state = { 0 };
The function mbsinit tests whether *ps corresponds to an initial state.
mbsinit returns non-zero if *ps is an initial state, or if ps is a null pointer. Otherwise it returns 0.
ISO/ANSI C, UNIX98
The behaviour of mbsinit depends on the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale.
| July 25, 1999 | GNU |