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### 2.44 `wcstombs`—minimal wide char string to multibyte string converter

Synopsis

         #include <stdlib.h>
         size_t wcstombs(char *s, const wchar_t *pwc, size_t n);

Description
When _MB_CAPABLE is not defined, this is a minimal ANSI-conforming implementation of `wcstombs`. In this case, all wide-characters are expected to represent single bytes and so are converted simply by casting to char.

When _MB_CAPABLE is defined, this routine calls `_wcstombs_r` to perform the conversion, passing a state variable to allow state dependent decoding. The result is based on the locale setting which may be restricted to a defined set of locales.

Returns
This implementation of `wcstombs` returns `0` if s is `NULL` or is the empty string; it returns `-1` if _MB_CAPABLE and one of the wide-char characters does not represent a valid multi-byte character; otherwise it returns the minimum of: `n` or the number of bytes that are transferred to `s`, not including the nul terminator.

If the return value is -1, the state of the `pwc` string is indeterminate. If the input has a length of 0, the output string will be modified to contain a wchar_t nul terminator if `n` > 0.

Portability
`wcstombs` is required in the ANSI C standard. However, the precise effects vary with the locale.

`wcstombs` requires no supporting OS subroutines.