CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c++visual-studio-2010winapitype-conversionwin32gui
user3374405
user3374405

Reputation: 33

Getting weird characters from conversion of char to TCHAR

I'm getting really weird characters from the conversion. Any idea why? I get the "data" from an external device and i need to display it to win32 GUI. It had no problem when i 

printf("%s\n",data);

in the console mode but having trouble when i migrate it to win32 which requires me to convert to TCHAR to display.

CHAR data[256];
TCHAR data1[256];
MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP,MB_COMPOSITE,data,-1,data1,0);   

CreateWindow(TEXT("STATIC"), data1, WS_VISIBLE | WS_CHILD |
                  10, 50,300,300,hWnd, (HMENU) none, NULL, NULL);

By the way, using 

hDLL=LoadLibrary("MyKad.dll");

in win32 couldn't work so I had to used

hDLL=LoadLibrary(TEXT("MyKad.dll"));

May I know is this right? Thanks

Upvotes: 1

Views: 493

Answers (1)

David Heffernan
David Heffernan

Reputation: 613262

The reason that your code fails is that you pass 0 in the final parameter of MultiByteToWideChar. You can fix your code by passing the length if data1:

MultiByteToWideChar(CP_ACP, MB_COMPOSITE, data, -1, data1, 256);

Note also that you should be checking for errors when calling API functions. Had you done so you would have discovered that MultiByteToWideChar was failing.

I use the following function to convert to UTF-16:

std::wstring MultiByteStringToWideString(const std::string& MultiByte,
    const UINT CodePage)
{
    std::wstring result;
    int cchWideChar = MultiByteToWideChar(CodePage, 0, MultiByte.c_str(), -1, 
        NULL, 0);
    if (cchWideChar > 0)
    {
        wchar_t* bufferW = new wchar_t[cchWideChar];
        if (MultiByteToWideChar(CodePage, 0, MultiByte.c_str(), -1, bufferW, 
            cchWideChar) != 0)
        {
            result = std::wstring(bufferW);
        }
        delete[] bufferW;
    }
    return result;
}

So you could use this as follows:

std::wstring windowName = MultiByteStringToWideString(data, CP_ACP);
CreateWindow(L"STATIC", windowName.c_str(), ...);

Upvotes: 2

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