String Manipulation in Windows

Many Windows functions duplicate or enhance familiar string-manipulation functions from the standard C library. Many of the enhancements enable Windows functions to work with Unicode or extended character sets. For example, the Windows functions in the following table are identical to standard C functions except that the Windows functions are enhanced for use with Unicode.

Windows function	Standard C function
lstrcat	strcat
lstrcmp	strcmp
lstrcmpi	strcmpi
lstrcpy	strcpy
lstrlen	strlen

The strlen standard C function, for example, always returns the number of bytes in a string, but the lstrlen function returns the number of characters, regardless of whether the characters are 1 or 2 bytes wide.

The following Windows functions differ from standard C functions such as tolower and toupper in that they operate on any character in a character set. By using the CharLower function, for example, a Windows-based application can convert an uppercase U with an umlaut (Ü) to lowercase (ü). For more information about character sets, see Single-byte Character Sets.

Function	Description
CharLower	Converts a character or string to lowercase.
CharLowerBuff	Converts a character string to lowercase.
CharNext	Moves to the next character in a string.
CharPrev	Moves to the preceding character in a string.
CharUpper	Converts a character or string to uppercase.
CharUpperBuff	Converts a string to uppercase.

The following Windows functions make determinations about a character based on the semantics of the language selected by the user. These functions are Unicode enabled.

Function	Description
IsCharAlpha	Determines whether a character is alphabetic.
IsCharAlphaNumeric	Determines whether a character is alphanumeric.
IsCharLower	Determines whether a character is lowercase.
IsCharUpper	Determines whether a character is uppercase.

The wsprintf and wvsprintf functions are extensions to the standard C functions sprintf and vsprintf. The Windows versions support format specifications unique to Unicode.

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