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Problems with const char* and LPCWSTR conversion

Started by Eldritch May 29, 2006 at 12:43 PM 1 replies 12.5k views

Original Post

May 29, 2006 at 12:43 PM

I am in the middle of writing an application, and have run into problems when trying to convert a const char* variable into an LPCWSTR type variable. Why convert? 1. CreateWindowEx(), which I use to create my application window with, takes only LPCWSTR type parameters for the window title/caption, so I simply do a type conversion (i.e. (LPCWSTR)windowTitle) on my parameter which is initially a const char*. 2. TextOut(), which I use to print text (I know it is supposed to be slow, but I am using it sparingly so do not worry about that), uses an LPCWSTR for the text that is to be printed, so I have a make a similar type conversion there as well. Now, converting from a const char* into an LPCWSTR makes the text appear garbled. Is there any way to solve this? I remember that it worked prior to acquiring Visual Studio 2005, when those functions accepted LPCSTR instead of the "wide char" (apparently unicode) LPCWSTR.

raz0r

May 29, 2006 at 1:20 PM

Go to your project settings and select "Use Multi-Byte Character Set" as your primary character set, or just #undef UNICODE before including windows header, or you can use TEXT macro, or you can directly call these ASCII functions. For example, CreateWindowExA and TextOutA.

janta

May 29, 2006 at 1:22 PM

Personally, I decided to use wide characters in my whole program to avoid such troubles.
If you are using static hard-coded strings somewhere you can prepend a L to specify wide character, like

WCHAR szName = L"My App";

Otherwise, maybe the function mbstowcs() can help you.

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