two q's..._T("What the heck?") and handling CString's as float's

[Cam]

I have two questions I could really use some help with...first of all, what is the difference between the two following function calls?: (1): m_cTabListMode.InsertItem(0, _T("Icon")); (2): m_cTabListMode.InsertItem(0, "Icon"); What is the "_T()" thing for...? :confused: Ok, second question. I'm working with a list control, and I need to display prices of particular items in one column of my listctrl. Below my list control I have an editbox which needs to contain the total price of all of the items in the listbox. As the listctrl requires that the prices be CString's, how do I convert them back to float's so that I can add up the total? Help on either topic would be greatly appreciated! -Cam Desautels

[Christian Graus]

Float to CString: mystring.Format("%.2f", myfloat); CString to float myfloat to atof(mystring); I *believe* the _T makes the string Unicode ? It's something *like* that, and is certainly superfluous in my experience ( i.e. I've never needed to do it or broken anything by not doing it ) Christian The content of this post is not necessarily the opinion of my yadda yadda yadda. To understand recursion, we must first understand recursion.

[PJ Arends]

_T(x) is a macro that that makes a string literal Unicode compliant. from TChar.h #define _T(x) __T(x) #define _TEXT(x) __T(x) and elsewhere in TChar.h #ifdef _UNICODE ... #define __T(x) L ## x ... #else ... #define __T(x) x ... #endif so _T("Icon") becomes "Icon" if _UNICODE is not defined, and L"Icon" if _UNICODE is defined So if you are not writing a Unicode app, there is no difference between the two function calls, but if you are using Unicode, there is a definite difference.

[Cam]

Thank you, very, very much.

[Lost User]

Another difference. If you are writing a UNICODE application, it runs on NT/2000/XP only. If you are writing an MBCS/SBCS application, it runs on all the operating systems, and when run on NT/2000/XP the MBCS/SBCS application will run slower than the UNICODE application because all MBCS/SBCS strings are converted to UNICODE strings at the Win32 API boundary. Matt Pietrek wrote an article on this years ago. So, Christian, for your Win NT/2000 applications, maybe you should make a UNICODE build? Slight Aside: If you are doing many multilanguage apps, there are so MBCS only bugs out there which will bring the box to its knees (the debugger doesn't even get a chance). Stephen Kellett