Processing wide characters
You can choose how to structure your data to improve performance. HCL Informix® GLS provides wide-character versions of most of its multibyte processing functions.
Typically, wide-character processing functions are faster than multibyte-character functions. However, wide characters require more space. Therefore, character data is generally stored and retrieved from the database in its multibyte form.
To use wide-character processing:
- Convert the multibyte string to a wide-character string with the ifx_gl_mbstowcs() function.
- Process the wide-character string.
- Convert the wide-character string back to a multibyte string with the ifx_gl_wcstombs() function.
This technique is cost effective if the data that you process
is traversed more than once.