Problem with wctomb...

[allez]

Hi,
I'm trying to convert a wide character string in UTF-8 into a multibyte string using wctomb and I'm running into a problem when I try to convert characters that take more than one byte (ie, non ASCII characters). Below is simple code that produces the problem:

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
  char  buffer[40];
  for(size_t i=0; i<40; ++i)
    buffer[i]=0;
//  wchar_t wch = L'ｱ'; (UTF-8 65393)
  wchar_t wch = L'ñ';
  wchar_t wide = 241;
  cout << wch << endl;
  int length;
  if (wch == wide)
    cout << "Yes!" << endl;

  length = wctomb( buffer, wch );
  printf( "The number of bytes that comprise the multibyte "
             "character is %i\n", length );
  printf( "And the converted string is \"%s\"\n", buffer );

	return 0;
}

If I substitue a simple character like L'e', then it works as expected, however with either of these more complicated characters (the first is Chinese, second is spanish) wctomb returns -1, meaning it couldn't convert the character. Why?
It fails if I use either the number or the actual letter representation, which makes sense because they are equivalent.

I'm running this on Suse Linux Enterprise Desktop 10 and compiling with g++ 4.1.0.

Thanks,
Andrew

[allez]

I found the solution. In my shell I have the LANG environment variable set to en_US.UTF-8 so I thought everything would be okay. However, inside the program I added the following lines

#include <locale>
	char* local = setlocale(LC_CTYPE, NULL);
	cout << "Current LC_CTYPE is " << local << endl;

and found out that it thought the LC_CTYPE is C. So adding the line

	setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_US.UTF-8");

made everything work as it should.

[ilikepython]

I found the solution. In my shell I have the LANG environment variable set to en_US.UTF-8 so I thought everything would be okay. However, inside the program I added the following lines

#include <locale>
	char* local = setlocale(LC_CTYPE, NULL);
	cout << "Current LC_CTYPE is " << local << endl;

and found out that it thought the LC_CTYPE is C. So adding the line

	setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_US.UTF-8");

made everything work as it should.

Glad you solved your problem.