wctypet

Wctypet is a programming concept used in some codebases to represent a set of wide-character class masks. It functions as an opaque handle that conveys characters' properties to library functions that classify or test wide characters. The term is not part of the standard C library or POSIX, but appears in projects that adopt a strongly typed approach to character classification.

Definition and representation: In these contexts, wctypet is typically defined by a typedef of an unsigned integer type, or as a wrapper around the standard wctype_t. The actual underlying representation is implementation-defined, and programs should treat values as opaque. The value is intended to be produced by a function such as wctype, which maps a character class name (for example, "uppercase" or "digit") to a mask.

Usage: A typical pattern is to obtain a mask with a call like wctypet m = wctype("uppercase"); and then test characters with a predicate such as iswctype(ch, m). Code that uses wctypet should also provide a standard path for environments that rely on wctype_t, or fall back to those APIs when wctypet is unavailable.

Portability and compatibility: Because wctypet is not standardized, its availability and exact definition vary by compiler and platform. Where possible, code should rely on the standard wctype_t and iswctype, or provide conditional implementations. See also: wctype_t, wctype, iswctype.