What does LPCWSTR stand for and how should it be handled with

Question

First of all  what is it exactly  I guess it is a pointer  LPC means long pointer constant   but what does  W  mean  Is it a specific pointer to a string or a pointer to a specific string   For example I want to close a Window named  TestWindow     HWND g hTest  LPCWSTR a   a     TestWindow    g hTest   FindWindowEx NULL  NULL  NULL  a   DestroyWindow g hTest     The code is illegal and it doesn t work since const char 6  cannot be converted to CONST WCHAR  I don t get it at all   I want to get a clear understanding of all these LPCWSTR  LPCSTR  LPSTR  I tried to find something   however I got confused even more  At msdn site FindWindowEx is declared as   HWND FindWindowEx            HWND hwndParent      HWND hwndChildAfter      LPCTSTR lpszClass      LPCTSTR lpszWindow      So the last parameter is LPCSTR  and the compiler demands on LPCWSTR   Please help

User · Answer

LPCWSTR is equivalent to wchar t const    It s a pointer to a wide character string that won t be modified by the function call   You can assign to LPCWSTRs by prepending a L to a string literal  LPCWSTR  myStr   L Hello World    LPCTSTR and any other T types  take a string type depending on the Unicode settings for your project  If  UNICODE is defined for your project  the use of T types is the same as the wide character forms  otherwise the Ansi forms  The appropriate function will also be called this way  FindWindowEx is defined as FindWindowExA or FindWindowExW depending on this definition

User · Answer

LPCWSTR stands for  Long Pointer to Constant Wide String   The W stands for Wide and means that the string is stored in a 2 byte character vs  the normal char   Common for any C C   code that has to deal with non-ASCII only strings    To get a normal C literal string to assign to a LPCWSTR  you need to prefix it with L  LPCWSTR a   L TestWindow

User · Answer

It s a long pointer to a constant  wide string  i e  a string of wide characters     Since it s a wide string  you want to make your constant look like  L TestWindow   I wouldn t create the intermediate a either  I d just pass L TestWindow  for the parameter   ghTest   FindWindowEx NULL  NULL  NULL  L TestWindow      If you want to be pedantically correct  an  LPCTSTR  is a  text  string -- a wide string in a Unicode build and a narrow string in an ANSI build  so you should use the appropriate macro   ghTest   FindWindow NULL  NULL  NULL   T  TestWindow       Few people care about producing code that can compile for both Unicode and ANSI character sets though  and if you don t getting it to really work correctly can be quite a bit of extra work for little gain  In this particular case  there s not much extra work  but if you re manipulating strings  there s a whole set of string manipulation macros that resolve to the correct functions

[c++] What does LPCWSTR stand for and how should it be handled with?

Examples related to c++

Examples related to winapi

Examples related to lpcstr