Convert wchar_t to char

Question

I was wondering is it safe to do so?

wchar_t wide = /* something */;
assert(wide >= 0 && wide < 256 &&);
char myChar = static_cast

        

Answer 1

A short function I wrote a while back to pack a wchar_t array into a char array. Characters that aren't on the ANSI code page (0-127) are replaced by '?' characters, and it handles surrogate pairs correctly.

size_t to_narrow(const wchar_t * src, char * dest, size_t dest_len){
  size_t i;
  wchar_t code;

  i = 0;

  while (src[i] != '\0' && i < (dest_len - 1)){
    code = src[i];
    if (code < 128)
      dest[i] = char(code);
    else{
      dest[i] = '?';
      if (code >= 0xD800 && code <= 0xD8FF)
        // lead surrogate, skip the next code unit, which is the trail
        i++;
    }
    i++;
  }

  dest[i] = '\0';

  return i - 1;

}