NAME

       mbsinit - test for initial shift state

SYNOPSIS

       #include <wchar.h>

       int mbsinit (const mbstate_t *ps);

DESCRIPTION

       Character   conversion  between  the  multibyte  representation  and  the  wide  character
       representation uses conversion state, of type mbstate_t.  Conversion of a  string  uses  a
       finite-state  machine; when it is interrupted after the complete conversion of a number of
       characters, it may need to save a state for processing the remaining  characters.  Such  a
       conversion state is needed for the sake of encodings such as ISO-2022 and SJIS.

       The  initial state is the state at the beginning of conversion of a string.  There are two
       kinds of state: The one used by multibyte to wide character conversion functions, such  as
       mbsrtowcs,  and  the one used by wide character to multibyte conversion functions, such as
       wcsrtombs, but they both fit in a mbstate_t, and they both have  the  same  representation
       for an initial state.

       For 8-bit or UTF-8 encodings, all states are equivalent to the initial state.

       One possible way to create an mbstate_t in initial state is to set it to zero:
         mbstate_t state;
         memset(&state,0,sizeof(mbstate_t));
       On Linux, the following works as well, but might generate compiler warnings:
         mbstate_t state = { 0 };

       The function mbsinit tests whether *ps corresponds to an initial state.

RETURN VALUE

       mbsinit returns non-zero if *ps is an initial state, or if ps is a null pointer. Otherwise
       it returns 0.

CONFORMING TO

       ISO/ANSI C, UNIX98

SEE ALSO

       mbsrtowcs(3), wcsrtombs(3)

NOTES

       The behaviour of mbsinit depends on the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale.