Wide character

Wide character is a computer programming term. It is a vague term used to represent a Datatype that is richer than the traditional 8-bit characters. It is not the same thing as Unicode.

wchar_t is a data type in ANSI/ISO C programming language and some other programming languages that is intended to represent wide characters.

The Unicode standard 4.0 says that

: ANSI/ISO C leaves the semantics of the wide character set to the specific implementation but requires that the characters from the portable character set correspond to their wide character equivalents by zero extension.

and that

: The width of wchar_t is compiler-specific and can be as small as 8 bits. Consequently, programs that need to be portable across any C or C++ compiler should not use wchar_t for storing Unicode text. The wchar_t type is intended for storing compiler-defined wide characters, which may be Unicode characters in some compilers.

Under Windows API, wchar_t is 16-bit wide; on Unix-like systems wchar_t is 32-bit wide.

In C standard library, <wchar.h> and <wctype.h> deal with the wide characters.