Name

mbsinit — test for initial shift state

Synopsis

#include <wchar.h>
int mbsinit( const mbstate_t *ps);
 

DESCRIPTION

Character conversion between the multibyte representation and the wide character representation uses conversion state, of type mbstate_t. Conversion of a string uses a finite-state machine; when it is interrupted after the complete conversion of a number of characters, it may need to save a state for processing the remaining characters. Such a conversion state is needed for the sake of encodings such as ISO-2022 and UTF-7.

The initial state is the state at the beginning of conversion of a string. There are two kinds of state: The one used by multibyte to wide character conversion functions, such as mbsrtowcs(3), and the one used by wide character to multibyte conversion functions, such as wcsrtombs(3), but they both fit in a mbstate_t, and they both have the same representation for an initial state.

For 8-bit encodings, all states are equivalent to the initial state. For multibyte encodings like UTF-8, EUC-*, BIG5 or SJIS, the wide character to multibyte conversion functions never produce non-initial states, but the multibyte to wide-character conversion functions like mbrtowc(3) do produce non-initial states when interrupted in the middle of a character.

One possible way to create an mbstate_t in initial state is to set it to zero:

    mbstate_t state;
    memset(&state,0,sizeof(mbstate_t));

On Linux, the following works as well, but might generate compiler warnings:

    mbstate_t state = { 0 };

The function mbsinit() tests whether *ps corresponds to an initial state.

RETURN VALUE

mbsinit() returns nonzero if *ps is an initial state, or if ps is a NULL pointer. Otherwise it returns 0.

ATTRIBUTES

Multithreading (see pthreads(7))

The mbsinit() function is thread-safe.

CONFORMING TO

C99.

NOTES

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

SEE ALSO

mbsrtowcs(3), wcsrtombs(3)

COLOPHON

This page is part of release 3.54 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/.


  Copyright (c) Bruno Haible <haibleclisp.cons.org>

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References consulted:
  GNU glibc-2 source code and manual
  Dinkumware C library reference http://www.dinkumware.com/
  OpenGroup's Single UNIX specification http://www.UNIX-systems.org/online.html
  ISO/IEC 9899:1999