What does the L in front a string mean in C

Question

this- gt textBox1- gt Name   L textBox1     Although it seems to work without the L  what is the purpose of the prefix  The way it is used doesn t even make sense to a hardcore C programmer

User · Accepted Answer

It s a wchar t literal  for extended character set  Wikipedia has a little discussion on this topic  and c   examples

User · Answer

It means that it is a wide character  wchar t    Similar to 1L being a long value

User · Answer

L is a prefix used for wide strings  Each character uses several bytes  depending on the size of wchar t   The encoding used is independent from this prefix  I mean it must not be necessarily UTF-16 unlike stated in other answers here

User · Answer

L  means wchar t  which  as opposed to a normal character  requires 16-bits of storage rather than 8-bits  Here s an example    A       41  ABC     41 42 43 L A      00 41 L ABC    00 41 00 42 00 43   A wchar t is twice big as a simple char  In daily use you don t need to use wchar t  but if you are using windows h you are going to need it

User · Answer

It means the text is stored as wchar t characters rather than plain old char characters    I originally said it meant unicode  I was wrong about that  But it can be used for unicode

User · Answer

It means it s an array of wide characters  wchar t  instead of narrow characters  char     It s a just a string of a different kind of character  not necessarily a Unicode string

[c++] What does the 'L' in front a string mean in C++?

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