fgetws(3)

✨ fgetws ✨

okay bestie, so this is a page from the Library Functions Manual (yes, the man pages, we love her) and today's main character is fgetws — she reads a wide-character string from a FILE stream 💖

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🌸 NAME 🌸

fgetws — read a wide-character string from a FILE stream

📚 LIBRARY 📚

Standard C library (libc, -lc)

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

#include <wchar.h>

wchar_t *fgetws(int n;
         wchar_t ws[restrict n], int n, FILE *restrict stream);

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

okay so fgetws() is literally the wide-character equivalent of fgets(3). she reads a string of at most n-1 wide characters into the wide-character array that ws points at, and then she pops a terminating null wide character (L'\0') on the end. iconic behavior, truly.

she stops reading wide characters as soon as she's encountered and stored a newline wide character. she also stops when the end of stream is reached. so like, she knows when to leave the party 🫶

⚠️ bestie listen — the programmer must make sure there's room for at least n wide characters at ws. no cap, that's on you, not her.

want a nonlocking counterpart? go see unlocked_stdio(3) ✨

🔥 RETURN VALUE 🔥

• if fgetws() is successful, she returns ws 💖
• if the end of stream was already reached, or if an error occurred, she returns NULL 😭

👑 ATTRIBUTES 👑

for an explanation of the terms used in this section, see attributes(7).

• Interface: fgetws()
  • Attribute: Thread safety
  • Value: MT-Safe

(so like, she's MT-Safe — thread safe, periodt 🤝)

🌈 STANDARDS 🌈

C11, POSIX.1-2008.

🦋 HISTORY 🦋

POSIX.1-2001, C99.

💜 NOTES 💜

• the behavior of fgetws() depends on the LC_CTYPE category of the current locale. locale check first, always 🌍
• in the absence of additional information passed to the fopen(3) call, it's reasonable to expect that fgetws() will actually read a multibyte string from the stream and then convert it to a wide-character string. slay, conversion arc ✨
• this function is unreliable, because it does not permit you to deal properly with null wide characters that may be present in the input. not me calling out a function like this 💀 for real though, that's a genuine limitation — don't build your whole parser on her if your input might have null wide chars in it 🙈

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• fgetwc(3)
• unlocked_stdio(3)

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okay that's the whole page, bestie 💅 this was Linux man-pages version 6.20, dated 2026-02-08 — go forth and read your wide strings responsibly, mwah 🎀💖✨