Convert UTF-16 to UTF-8 under Windows and Linux, in C

I was wondering if there is a recommended 'cross' Windows and Linux method for the purpose of converting strings from UTF-16LE to UTF-8? or one should use different methods for each environment?

I've managed to google few references to 'iconv' , but for somreason I can't find samples of basic conversions, such as - converting a wchar_t UTF-16 to UTF-8.

Anybody can recommend a method that would be 'cross', and if you know of references or a guide with samples, would very appreciate it.

Thanks, Doori Bar

If you don't want to use ICU,

Windows: WideCharToMultiByte
Linux: iconv (Glibc)

user4657497

Change encoding to UTF-8 with PowerShell:

powershell -Command "Get-Content PATH\temp.txt -Encoding Unicode | Set-Content -Encoding UTF8 PATH2\temp.txt"

The open source ICU library is very commonly used.

I have run into this problem too, I solve it by using boost locale library

try
{           
    std::string utf8 = boost::locale::conv::utf_to_utf<char, short>(
                        (short*)wcontent.c_str(), 
                        (short*)(wcontent.c_str() + wcontent.length()));
    content = boost::locale::conv::from_utf(utf8, "ISO-8859-1");
}
catch (boost::locale::conv::conversion_error e)
{
    std::cout << "Fail to convert from UTF-8 to " << toEncoding << "!" << std::endl;
    break;
}

The boost::locale::conv::utf_to_utf function try to convert from a buffer that encoded by UTF-16LE to UTF-8, The boost::locale::conv::from_utf function try to convert from a buffer that encoded by UTF-8 to ANSI, make sure the encoding is right(Here I use encoding for Latin-1, ISO-8859-1).

Another reminder is, in Linux std::wstring is 4 bytes long, but in Windows std::wstring is 2 bytes long, so you would better not use std::wstring to contain UTF-16LE buffer.

Remy Lebeau

wchar_t *src = ...;
int srclen = ...;
char *dst = ...;
int dstlen = ...;
iconv_t conv = iconv_open("UTF-8", "UTF-16");
iconv(conv, (char*)&src, &srclen, &dst, &dstlen);
iconv_close(conv);

There's also utfcpp, which is a header-only library.

DooriBar

Thanks guys, this is how I managed to solve the 'cross' windows and linux requirement: