Question regarding Wide character

[Shitian Long]

I have question regarding wide character. I have been reading article saying that this datatype is used for non latin characters for example Japanese or Chinese. but my question is according to this link
http://www.hscripts.com/tutorials/cpp/cpp-datatypes/wchart-datatype.php

"This datatype occupies "2 or 4" bytes"

My question is why this data type occupies dynamic length of data.

And how I could tell in which case it occupies what amount of data

Thanks

[28poGNh0]

The size of data types probably depend on whice platform you're using
for exp int in 16-bit environment is 2 bytes ,in 32-bit environment is 4bytes

a wide character take 16 bit width which equal to 2 bytes never head about 4 bytes

you can know the size of datatypes by using the sizeof keyword as ulistrated in this simple exp

# include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main()
{
	cout << sizeof(wchar_t) << endl;

	return 0;
}

[Cubbi]

It is implementation-defined, which means it differs between compilers and platforms.

Specifically, it's 2 bytes on Windows, which adopted Unicode back when it was limited to 16 bits, and failed to upgrade.

It's 4 bytes pretty much everywhere else (e.g. Linux), since that's how much is necessary to represent any single Unicode code point.

You can find out how big it is by compiling a test program and printing sizeof(wchar_t)