Wide char is similar to char data type, except that wide char take up twice the space and can take on much larger values as a result. char can take 256 values which corresponds to entries in the ASCII table. On the other hand, wide char can take on 65536 values which corresponds to UNICODE values which is a recent international standard which allows for the encoding of characters for virtually all languages and commonly used symbols.
Just like the type for character constants is char, the type for wide character is wchar_t.
This data type occupies 2 or 4 bytes depending on the compiler being used.
Mostly the wchar_t datatype is used when international languages like Japanese are used.
•L is the prefix for wide character literals and wide-character string literals which tells the compiler that that the char or string is of type wide-char.
•w is prefixed in operations like scanning (wcin) or printing (wcout) while operating wide-char type.
Functions for wide character array strings :
Most of the functions for wide character array strings are defined in the header file cwchar.
wcslen() : syntax: size_t wcslen (const wchar_t* wcs);
It returns the length of the wide string. This is the wide character equivalent of strlen.
