Convert std::string to LPCWSTR in C++

std::string

The std::string is a class of C++ Standard Library (STL) that represents a string (sequence of characters). It is used to handle strings with better memory management, i.e., it provides dynamic memory management for strings and supports a rich set of in-built functions for string manipulation.

Syntax

Following is the syntax of string:

string str = "tutorialspoint";

std::LPCWSTR

The LPCWSTR stands for Long Pointer to Constant Wide STRing. It is a constant string of 16-bit Unicode characters, which may be null-terminated. It is the same as a string but with wide characters.

Syntax

Following is the syntax of LPCWSTR:

LPCWSTR str = "tutorialspoint";

Since LPCWSTR is defined by Microsoft developers are required to use the <window.h> header file to use LPCWSTR string.

Converting std::string to LPCWSTR

Following are the steps to convert a string to LPCWSTR:

Step 1: The initial work is to initialize an object of String class into a wstring. std::wstring is used for wide character/Unicode (UTF-16) String. So, the transformation is as easy as passing endpoint iterators from the given string to the std::wstring() initializer.

std::wstring(str.begin(), str.end())
It returns a wstring object.

Step 2: Here, in the step, we apply c_str() method on the returned string object. It will return the equivalent of the LPCWSTR string.

C++ Program to Convert String to LPCWSTR

In the following example, we create a C++ program that converts a std::string to an LPCWSTR string:

#include <windows.h>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
   // An string object
   string str = "tutorialspoint.com";
   
   // An object of wstring
   wstring wstr = wstring(str.begin(), str.end());
   
   // Applying c_str() method on wstr
   LPCWSTR wideString = wstr.c_str();
   
   cout << "str is : " << str << endl;
   wcout << "wideString is : "<< wideString << endl;
}

Following is the output. Note that this code will work only with Microsoft Visual Studio or MinGW because these support Windows.h which is only available in Windows environments.

str is: "tutorialspoint.com"
wideString is: "tutorialspoint.com"