Next: wcstod, Previous: strtoull, Up: Stdlib

### 2.39 `wcsrtombs`, `wcsnrtombs`—convert a wide-character string to a character string

Synopsis

         #include <wchar.h>
         size_t wcsrtombs(char *dst, const wchar_t **src, size_t len,
             mbstate_t *ps);

         #include <wchar.h>
         size_t _wcsrtombs_r(struct _reent *ptr, char *dst,
             const wchar_t **src, size_t len,
             mbstate_t *ps);

         #include <wchar.h>
         size_t wcsnrtombs(char *dst, const wchar_t **src,
             size_t nwc, size_t len, mbstate_t *ps);

         #include <wchar.h>
         size_t _wcsnrtombs_r(struct _reent *ptr, char *dst,
             const wchar_t **src, size_t nwc,
             size_t len, mbstate_t *ps);

Description
The `wcsrtombs` function converts a string of wide characters indirectly pointed to by src to a corresponding multibyte character string stored in the array pointed to by dst>. No more than len bytes are written to dst>.

If dst> is NULL, no characters are stored.

If dst> is not NULL, the pointer pointed to by src is updated to point to the character after the one that conversion stopped at. If conversion stops because a null character is encountered, *src is set to NULL.

The mbstate_t argument, ps, is used to keep track of the shift state. If it is NULL, `wcsrtombs` uses an internal, static mbstate_t object, which is initialized to the initial conversion state at program startup.

The `wcsnrtombs` function behaves identically to `wcsrtombs`, except that conversion stops after reading at most nwc characters from the buffer pointed to by src.

Returns
The `wcsrtombs` and `wcsnrtombs` functions return the number of bytes stored in the array pointed to by dst (not including any terminating null), if successful, otherwise it returns (size_t)-1.

Portability
`wcsrtombs` is defined by C99 standard. `wcsnrtombs` is defined by the POSIX.1-2008 standard.