MBSINIT(3) Linux Programmer's Manual MBSINIT(3)

NAME
       mbsinit - test for initial shift state

SYNOPSIS
       #include 

       int mbsinit(const mbstatet *ps);

DESCRIPTION
       Character  conversion between the multibyte representation and the wide
       character representation uses  conversion  state,  of  type  mbstatet.
       Conversion  of  a string uses a finite-state machine; when it is inter‐
       rupted 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 wcsr‐
       tombs(3), but they both fit in a mbstatet, 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 char‐
       acter 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 mbstatet in initial state is to set it
       to zero:

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

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

           mbstatet 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
       For   an   explanation   of   the  terms  used  in  this  section,  see
       attributes(7).

       ┌──────────┬───────────────┬─────────┐
       │Interface │ Attribute     │ Value   │
       ├──────────┼───────────────┼─────────┤
       │mbsinit() │ Thread safety │ MT-Safe │
       └──────────┴───────────────┴─────────┘
CONFORMING TO
       C99.

NOTES
       The behavior of mbsinit() depends on the LCCTYPE category of the  cur‐
       rent locale.

SEE ALSO
       mbsrtowcs(3), wcsrtombs(3)

COLOPHON
       This  page  is  part of release 3.53 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/.



GNU                               2000-11-20                        MBSINIT(3)