How to convert char to wchar_t*?

Question

As the title states I have a simple char that retrieves a full path name of a file I am looking for and I need to convert it to const wchar_t. How can I achieve this? Here is an example of the code:

int main()
{
    char filename[] = "poc.png";
    char fullFilename[MAX_PATH];
    GetFullPathName(filename, MAX_PATH, fullFilename, nullptr);
    const wchar_t *path = fullFilename;
}

As you can see I am trying to get the filename to convert but I couldn't find a way to do so. What would be the most simple solution to this?

You can simply use Unicode version of Win API functions as described by @tenfour in any case if you still need to convert (for some other reason) You can check [this](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/49697488/how-to-convert-utf8-char-array-to-windows-1252-char-array/49697722#49697722) in case of Windows you can use [MultiByteToWideChar](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/api/stringapiset/nf-stringapiset-multibytetowidechar) — Victor Gubin, Oct 14 '20 at 19:25
Step 1: Find out what narrow character encoding the source uses. Step 2: Find out which wide character encoding you want to produce. Step 3: Implement a conversion function between those two character encodings. — eerorika, Oct 14 '20 at 19:29

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 14 '20 at 19:20

Your code doesn't show any need to convert between char and wchar_t. Most likely you don't actually need to convert the character types. If you want to use the wchar_t-friendly GetFullPathNameW, then just use wchar_t instead of char.

int main()
{
    wchar_t fullFilename[MAX_PATH];
    GetFullPathNameW(L"poc.png", MAX_PATH, fullFilename, nullptr);
    const wchar_t *path = fullFilename;
    return 0;
}

If you really do need to convert between wchar_t-based C-style strings and char-based C-style strings, then you can use the APIs MultiByteToWideChar and WideCharToMultiByte.

Keep in mind that the value GetFullPathNameW returns indicates whether or not the buffer was big enough to hold the result. (The path can be much longer than MAX_PATH.) — Eljay, Oct 14 '20 at 19:39

How to convert char to wchar_t*?

1 Answers1