# **[](https://en.cppreference.com/w/c/header/uchar)** provides `char16_t` and `char32_t` with fixed, portable UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings (C11). Conversion functions translate between multibyte (UTF-8) and these encodings, suitable for portable Unicode handling. Use this instead of `wchar_t` for Unicode code that must work identically across platforms. ## Example This example converts a UTF-8 string to UTF-32 code points and displays them. ```c // compile: gcc -o ucharexample ucharexample.c // run: ./ucharexample // description: convert UTF-8 to UTF-32 and iterate code points #include #include #include #include int main() { setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); const char* utf8 = "héllo"; mbstate_t state = {0}; char32_t c32; size_t n; while (*utf8) { n = mbrtoc32(&c32, utf8, strlen(utf8), &state); if (n == 0 || n == (size_t)-1 || n == (size_t)-2) break; printf("U+%04X (%zu bytes)\n", (unsigned)c32, n); utf8 += n; } return 0; } ```