2.50 wcstombs—minimal wide char string to multibyte string converter

Synopsis

#include <stdlib.h>
size_t wcstombs(char *restrict s, const wchar_t *restrict pwc, size_t n);

Description
When _MB_CAPABLE is not defined, this is a minimal ANSI-conforming implementation of wcstombs. In this case, all wide-characters are expected to represent single bytes and so are converted simply by casting to char.

When _MB_CAPABLE is defined, this routine calls _wcstombs_r to perform the conversion, passing a state variable to allow state dependent decoding. The result is based on the locale setting which may be restricted to a defined set of locales.

Returns
This implementation of wcstombs returns 0 if s is NULL or is the empty string; it returns -1 if _MB_CAPABLE and one of the wide-char characters does not represent a valid multi-byte character; otherwise it returns the minimum of: n or the number of bytes that are transferred to s, not including the nul terminator.

If the return value is -1, the state of the pwc string is indeterminate. If the input has a length of 0, the output string will be modified to contain a wchar_t nul terminator if n > 0.

Portability
wcstombs is required in the ANSI C standard. However, the precise effects vary with the locale.

wcstombs requires no supporting OS subroutines.