6.19.24 mblen Function

Determines the length of a multibyte character.

Include

<wchar.h>

Prototype

int mblen(const char * s, size_t n);

Arguments

s

a pointer to the multibyte character to check

n

the maximum number of bytes to check

Return Value

If s is a null pointer, the function returns a nonzero or zero value, which indicates if multibyte character encodings, respectively, do or do not have state-dependent encodings.

If s is not a null pointer, the function returns 0 if s points to the null character, returns −1 if the processed bytes do not form a valid multibyte character, or returns the number of bytes of the converted multibyte character.

Remarks

The function determines the number of bytes taken up by the multibyte character pointed to by s.

Example

See the notes at the beginning of this chapter or section for information on using printf() or scanf() (and other functions reading and writing the stdin or stdout streams) in the example code.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <locale.h>

int main(void)
{
  int len;
  char * mbs = "żoś";

  setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "");
  while(*mbs) {
    len = mblen(mbs, 4);
    printf("character length %d bytes\n", len);
    mbs += len;
  }
}

Example Output

character length 2 bytes
character length 1 bytes
character length 2 bytes