Conversion of wchar_t* to string

Question

How can I convert an wchar_t* array to an std::string varStr in win32 console.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4339960/how-do-i-convert-wchar-t-to-stdstring — RC Brand, Dec 31 '14 at 11:36

score 59 · Accepted Answer · answered Dec 31 '14 at 11:58

59

Use wstring, see this code:

// Your wchar_t*
wchar_t* txt = L"Hello World";
wstring ws(txt);
// your new String
string str(ws.begin(), ws.end());
// Show String
cout << str << endl;

answered Dec 31 '14 at 11:58

FelipeDurar

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Completelly wrong. This fails if `txt` contains any non–ascii character. If you replace `"Hello World"` with `"…"`, then `…` becomes `&`. This *solution* is highly harmful, causing data loss. – Jan 29 '18 at 23:15
2

WARNING: Use this ONLY if the source string is made of ASCII characters. As previous comment says, extended (multi-byte) Unicode characters may be lost or replaced by garbage. – Simón Apr 03 '20 at 14:13
The compiler will also warn about possible loss of data here. – qz- Jul 02 '23 at 03:51

score 10 · Answer 2 · answered Dec 31 '14 at 12:24

You should use the wstring class belonging to the namespace std. It has a constructor which accepts a parameter of the type wchar_t*.

Here is a full example of using this class.

wchar_t* characters=L"Test";
std::wstring string(characters);

You do not have to use a constructor containing String.begin() and String.end() because the constructor of std::wstring automatically allocates memory for storing the array of wchar_t and copies the array to the allocated memory.

What if you specifically need a non wide string? – rollsch Oct 06 '19 at 06:43 — rollsch, Oct 06 '19 at 06:43

Conversion of wchar_t* to string

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