centos man page for wcstombs

WCSTOMBS(3)						     Linux Programmer's Manual						       WCSTOMBS(3)

NAME
       wcstombs - convert a wide-character string to a multibyte string

SYNOPSIS
       #include <stdlib.h>

       size_t wcstombs(char *dest, const wchar_t *src, size_t n);

DESCRIPTION
       If  dest  is not a NULL pointer, the wcstombs() function converts the wide-character string src to a multibyte string starting at dest.	At
       most n bytes are written to dest.  The conversion starts in the initial state.  The conversion can stop for three reasons:

       1. A wide character has been encountered that can not be represented as a multibyte sequence (according to the current  locale).   In  this
       case (size_t) -1 is returned.

       2.  The	length	limit  forces  a stop.	In this case the number of bytes written to dest is returned, but the shift state at this point is
       lost.

       3. The wide-character string has been completely converted, including the terminating null wide character (L'').  In this case  the  con-
       version ends in the initial state.  The number of bytes written to dest, excluding the terminating null byte (''), is returned.

       The programmer must ensure that there is room for at least n bytes at dest.

       If  dest  is  NULL,  n is ignored, and the conversion proceeds as above, except that the converted bytes are not written out to memory, and
       that no length limit exists.

       In order to avoid the case 2 above, the programmer should make sure n is greater or equal to wcstombs(NULL,src,0)+1.

RETURN VALUE
       The wcstombs() function returns the number of bytes that make up the converted part of multibyte sequence, not  including  the  terminating
       null byte.  If a wide character was encountered which could not be converted, (size_t) -1 is returned.

CONFORMING TO
       C99.

NOTES
       The behavior of wcstombs() depends on the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale.

       The function wcsrtombs(3) provides a thread safe interface to the same functionality.

SEE ALSO
       mbstowcs(3), wcsrtombs(3)

COLOPHON
       This  page is part of release 3.53 of the Linux man-pages project.  A description of the project, and information about reporting bugs, can
       be found at http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.

GNU
								    2011-10-16							       WCSTOMBS(3)