.\" Copyright (c) Bruno Haible <haible@clisp.cons.org>
.\"
.\" 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.
.\"
.\" 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
.\"
.TH WCTOMB 3  1999-07-25 "GNU" "Linux Programmer's Manual"
.SH NAME
wctomb \- convert a wide character to a multibyte sequence
.SH SYNOPSIS
.nf
.B #include <stdlib.h>
.sp
.BI "int wctomb(char *" s ", wchar_t " wc );
.fi
.SH DESCRIPTION
If \fIs\fP is not NULL,
the
.BR wctomb ()
function converts the wide character
\fIwc\fP to its multibyte representation and stores it at the beginning of
the character array pointed to by \fIs\fP.
It updates the shift state, which
is stored in a static anonymous variable
only known to the wctomb function,
and returns the length of said multibyte representation,
that is, the number of
bytes written at \fIs\fP.
.PP
The programmer must ensure that there is
room for at least \fBMB_CUR_MAX\fP
bytes at \fIs\fP.
.PP
If \fIs\fP is NULL, the
.BR wctomb ()
function
.\" The Dinkumware doc and the Single UNIX specification say this, but
.\" glibc doesn't implement this.
resets the shift state, only known to this function,
to the initial state, and
returns nonzero if the encoding has nontrivial shift state,
or zero if the encoding is stateless.
.SH "RETURN VALUE"
If \fIs\fP is not NULL, the
.BR wctomb ()
function
returns the number of bytes
that have been written to the byte array at \fIs\fP.
If \fIwc\fP can not be
represented as a multibyte sequence (according
to the current locale), \-1 is returned.
.PP
If \fIs\fP is NULL, the
.BR wctomb ()
function returns nonzero if the
encoding has nontrivial shift state, or zero if the encoding is stateless.
.SH "CONFORMING TO"
C99.
.SH NOTES
The behavior of
.BR wctomb ()
depends on the
.B LC_CTYPE
category of the
current locale.
.PP
This function is not multithread safe.
The function
.BR wcrtomb (3)
provides
a better interface to the same functionality.
.SH "SEE ALSO"
.BR MB_CUR_MAX (3),
.BR wcrtomb (3),
.BR wcstombs (3)
.SH COLOPHON
This page is part of release 3.44 of the Linux
.I man-pages
project.
A description of the project,
and information about reporting bugs,
can be found at
http://www.kernel.org/doc/man-pages/.