WStr

WStr is a shorthand encountered in programming and documentation to denote a wide-character string, i.e., a string whose characters are stored in a wider encoding than the traditional single-byte char. Wide strings are used to represent Unicode text and enable international characters. The exact encoding and memory layout depend on the platform and language: for example, on Windows wide strings commonly use UTF-16, stored as sequences of 16-bit code units.

In code, WStr is not a formal standard type but a naming convention that may appear as a typedef or alias such as typedef wchar_t* WStr; or as a project-specific string type for wide characters. Some languages expose built-in wide-string types (for instance, wchar_t or std::wstring in C++, or strings with Unicode semantics in higher-level languages). WStr therefore is best understood as a contextual label rather than a universal type.

Handling wide strings involves encoding and conversion considerations. Narrow strings (char*, UTF-8, or locale-specific encodings) must be converted to wide strings when Unicode support is required, and back when displaying or outputting. Common tools include mbstowcs and wcstombs in C, or platform-specific APIs such as MultiByteToWideChar on Windows.

Related concepts include Unicode, UTF-16, UTF-32, wchar_t, and standard library wide-string types such as std::wstring. The term WStr appears mainly in documentation, legacy code, or bindings where a distinction between narrow and wide strings is important. See also: Unicode, UTF-16, wchar_t, std::wstring, LPCWSTR.