mbsinit (3)
Leading comments
Copyright (c) Bruno Haible <haible@clisp.cons.org> %%%LICENSE_START(GPLv2+_DOC_ONEPARA) This is free documentation; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version. %%%LICENSE_END References consulted: GNU glibc-2 source code and manual Dinkumware C library reference http://www.dinkumware.com/ OpenGroup's Single UNIX specificat...
NAME
mbsinit - test for initial shift stateSYNOPSIS
#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 NULL. Otherwise, it returns 0.ATTRIBUTES
For an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).| Interface | Attribute | Value |
| mbsinit() | Thread safety | MT-Safe |