Unicode strings

[Kevin Koltzau]

I've come upon an instance where I need to create a large lookup table of 
unicode strings, and was curious what the recommended way to handle this was.
Using MSVC I would simply declare the string as L"Text"

I only see two options currently, either declare the string as
(const WCHAR[]){'T','e','x','t'}
or store as non-unicode and use WideCharToMultiByte/MultiByteToWideChar as 
appropriate

As this is being implemented for a unicode-only function, it seems silly to 
convert the string, but declaring it as (const WCHAR[]){'T','e','x','t'} is a 
little unwieldy for the quantity of data that I need to declare

[Eric Pouech]

Kevin Koltzau wrote:
> I've come upon an instance where I need to create a large lookup table of 
> unicode strings, and was curious what the recommended way to handle this was.
> Using MSVC I would simply declare the string as L"Text"
>
> I only see two options currently, either declare the string as
> (const WCHAR[]){'T','e','x','t'}
> or store as non-unicode and use WideCharToMultiByte/MultiByteToWideChar as 
> appropriate
>
> As this is being implemented for a unicode-only function, it seems silly to 
> convert the string, but declaring it as (const WCHAR[]){'T','e','x','t'} is a 
> little unwieldy for the quantity of data that I need to declare

as the L"Text" construct is not supported inside,
as using WideCharToMultiByte will cause memory and CPU consumption 
(especially for static lookup tables),

the (const WCHAR[]){'T','e','x','t'} (don't forget the trailing '\0') is 
the preferred. We all know it's a PITA, but it's better to put the 
constraint once, at code writing time.
When I'm faced with this, I'm using some macros in emacs to do the task 
(ie, from a "text" string convert it to the 't','e','x','t' form)

A+

[Alexandre Julliard]

Eric Pouech  writes:
> the (const WCHAR[]){'T','e','x','t'} (don't forget the trailing '\0')
> is the preferred. We all know it's a PITA, but it's better to put the
> constraint once, at code writing time.

Note that the (const WCHAR[]) cast is not portable, so you shouldn't
use that. You need to declare a real array of WCHARs.