Wide character

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Wide character is a computer programming term. It is a vague term used to represent a datatype that is richer than the traditional 8-bit characters. It is not the same thing as Unicode.

wchar_t is a data type in ANSI/ISO C and some other programming languages that is intended to represent wide characters.

The Unicode standard 4.0 says that

"ANSI/ISO C leaves the semantics of the wide character set to the specific implementation but requires that the characters from the portable C execution set correspond to their wide character equivalents by zero extension."

and that

"The width of wchar_t is compiler-specific and can be as small as 8 bits. Consequently, programs that need to be portable across any C or C++ compiler should not use wchar_t for storing Unicode text. The wchar_t type is intended for storing compiler-defined wide characters, which may be Unicode characters in some compilers."

Under Windows API, wchar_t is 16-bits wide. The Windows API breaks the ANSI/ISO C standard by not making wchar_t the character type that supports all the system representable characters in a single wchar_t unit; instead, wchar_t in Windows represents a UTF-16 character (or part of it).

On Unix-like systems wchar_t is 32-bits wide.

In ANSI C library header files, <wchar.h> and <wctype.h> deal with the wide characters.