Why does my std::wofstream write ansi?

Question

Hi,

I've got wide string and I'm writing it to a wofstream that I opened in out|binary mode. When I look in the resultant file, it's missing every other byte.

I was expecting that when I opened the file in visual studio with the binary editor that I'd see every other byte as a zero, but I'm not seeing the zeros.

Do you know what I'm missing?

Thanks.

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The code is something like this:

CAtlStringW data = L"some data";
wofstream stream("c:\hello.txt", ios_base:out|ios_base:binary);
stream.write( data.GetBuffer(), data.GetLength() );
stream.close();

Answer 1

When you write to file using output wide stream, what actually happens is that it converts the wide characters to other 8-bit encoding.

If you were using UTF-8 locale it would convert wide strings to UTF-8 encoded text (but MSVC does not provides UTF-8 locales) so generally it would try to convert to some code-page like cp1251 or to ASCII.

Answer 2

see the "Community Content" at the bottom of the page http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/f1d6b0fk(VS.80).aspx. In short, you have to use pubsetbuf() to use a wchar_t based internal buffer for your stream (instead of a char based).