How can you cast between wchar_t* and an int?

Question

I have a function which returns the inner text of an xml element. It returns it, however, as a const wchar_t*. I wish to return this value as an integer (And a float in some other cases). What is the best method for doing so?

Answer 1

1) manual parsing (using sprintf & atof/atoi for instance)

2) using boost::lexical_cast (see http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1%5F40%5F0/libs/conversion/lexical%5Fcast.htm)

3) using string streams (http://www.cplusplus.com/reference/iostream/ostringstream/)

Answer 2

The C++ way would be:

wchar_t* foo = L"123";
std::wistringstream s(foo);
int i = 0;
s >> i;

With Boost, you could do:

try {
    int i2 = boost::lexical_cast<int>(foo);
} catch (boost::bad_lexical_cast const&) {
    ...
}

Depending on which CRT implementation you're using you may have "wide" atoi/strtol functions:

int i = _wtoi(foo);
long l = _wcstol(foo, NULL, 10);