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Passing narrow string arguments to wide string functions or wide string arguments to narrow string functions can lead to unexpected and undefined behavior 151. Scaling problems are likely because of the difference in size between wide and narrow characters. (See ARR39-C. Do not add or subtract a scaled integer to a pointer.) Because wide strings are terminated by a null wide character and can contain null bytes, determining the length is also problematic.

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Confusing narrow and wide character strings can result in buffer overflows, data truncation, and other defects.

Automated Detection

Modern compilers recognize the difference between a char * and a wchar_t *, so compiling code that violates this rule will generate warnings. It is feasible to have automated software that recognizes functions of improper width and replaces them with functions of proper width (that is, software that uses wcsncpy() when it recognizes that the parameters are of type wchar_t *).

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