Wide characters

The HCL Informix® GLS functions and macros that handle multibyte characters use special multibyte-processing algorithms to determine the size of multibyte characters. However, the handling of these full multibyte-processing algorithms can be significant. Therefore, the Informix GLS library provides support for wide characters as an alternative form for the processing of multibyte characters. Wide characters allow you to rely on the C compiler built-in scaling instead of the multibyte-processing algorithms.

A wide-character form of a code set involves the normalization of the size of each multibyte character so that each character is the same size. This size must be equal to or greater than the largest character that an operating system can support, and it must match the size of an integer data type that the C compiler can scale (such as short int, int, and long int).

The names of most Informix GLS functions that handle wide characters start with one of the following strings:

ifx_gl_wc: Handles a wide character
ifx_gl_wcs: Handles a wide-character string

For example, the function ifx_gl_wctomb() converts a wide character to a multibyte character, and ifx_gl_wcslen() determines the length of a wide-character string.