Visual Studio multibyte chars to single bytes

Question

Is there a simple way to convert multibyte UTF8 data (from Google Contacts API via https://www.google.com/m8/feeds/) to single bytes? I know the extended ASCII set is non-standard but, for example, my program which will display the info in an MFC CListBox is quite happy to show 'E acute' as 0xE9. I only need it to cope with a few similar European symbols. I've discovered I can convert everything with MultiByteToWideChar() but don't want to have to change lots of functions to accept wide characters if possible. Thanks.

Answer 1

If you need to convert char * from UTF8 to ANSI, try the following function:

// change encoding from UTF8 to ANSI
char* change_encoding_from_UTF8_to_ANSI(char* szU8)
{ 
    int wcsLen = ::MultiByteToWideChar(CP_UTF8, NULL, szU8, strlen(szU8), NULL, 0);
    wchar_t* wszString = new wchar_t[wcsLen + 1];
    ::MultiByteToWideChar(CP_UTF8, NULL, szU8, strlen(szU8), wszString, wcsLen);
    wszString[wcsLen] = '\0';

    int ansiLen = ::WideCharToMultiByte(CP_ACP, NULL, wszString, wcslen(wszString), NULL, 0, NULL, NULL);
    char* szAnsi = new char[ansiLen + 1];
    ::WideCharToMultiByte(CP_ACP, NULL, wszString, wcslen(wszString), szAnsi, ansiLen, NULL, NULL);
    szAnsi[ansiLen] = '\0';

    delete []wszString;
    return szAnsi;
}

Answer 2

Utf8 has a 1-to-1 mapping with Ascii characters so if you are receiving Ascii characters as utf8 ones, AFAIK you can directly read them as Ascii. If you have non-Ascii chars then there's no way you can express them in Ascii (any byte > 0x80)