Creating a Win32 Window app with English title bar, but the title bar becomes Chinese out of nowhere. How come?

casting, createwindow, hwnd, string, windows

Solution

Your application is being compiled as a unicode application (this is defined in the project settings). This means that strings you pass to Windows API functions need to be wide-character strings, specified like this: `L"MyTitleName"`. You can't cast to LPCWSTR because that won't actually change the string type, it will just try to pass the string off as something it isn't.

This code should work:

wcex.lpszClassName = L"MyTitleName";

 // code snipped

wndHandle = CreateWindow(
            L"MyTitleName",     //the window class to use
            L"MyTitleName",     //the title bar text
            ...

If you want to use the original code from the tutorial without modifying it, you can disable unicode mode: In the project properties go to 'General' tab, and set `Character Set` to `Use Multi-Byte Character Set`. Don't do this for any program which might have to support additional languages someday.

Problem

``` HWND wndHandle; //global variable // code snipped WNDCLASSEX wcex; // code snipped wcex.lpszClassName = (LPCWSTR) "MyTitleName"; // code snipped wndHandle = CreateWindow( (LPCWSTR)"MyTitleName", //the window class to use (LPCWSTR)"MyTitleName", //the title bar text ... ... ``` I am following a tutorial for Win32 Window application. The code above is used to set the name of the title bar of the window screen. The compiler yells at me : "cannot convert from 'const char [12]' to 'LPCWSTR'" so okay, I typecasted my string "MyTitleName" with (LPCWSTR), and everything compiled just fine. However, during runtime, the title of the window screen turns out to be Chinese characters. I tried change the string around and the Chinese characters always change according to my string somehow. I am using XP Visual C++ 2008 Express Edition and I got English (United States) as a setting for non-unicode programs. I don't get it. How come the string become Chinese?

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