Most multibyte-character routines in the Microsoft run-time library recognize multibyte-character sequences according to the current multibyte code page setting. The following multibyte-character routines depend instead on the locale code page (specifically, on the LC_CTYPE category setting of the current locale):
Locale-Dependent Multibyte Routines
| Routine | Use |
| mblen | Validate and return number of bytes in multibyte character |
| _mbstrlen | For multibyte-character strings: validate each character in string; return string length |
| mbstowcs | Convert sequence of multibyte characters to corresponding sequence of wide characters |
| mbtowc | Convert multibyte character to corresponding wide character |
| wcstombs | Convert sequence of wide characters to corresponding sequence of multibyte characters |
| wctomb | Convert wide character to corresponding multibyte character |