Following my previous question: Why `strchr` seems to work with multibyte characters, despite man page disclaimer?, I figured out that strchr was a bad choice.
Instead I am thinking about using strstr to look for a single character (multi-byte not char):
const char str[] = "This string contains é which is a multi-byte character";
char * pos = strstr(str, "é"); // 'é' = 0xC3A9: 2 bytes
printf("%s\n", pos);
Ouput:
é which is a multi-byte character
Which is what I expect: the position of the 1st byte of my multi-byte character.
A priori, this is not the canonical use of strstr but it seems to work well.
Is this workaround safe ? Can you think about any side-effect or special case that would cause a bug ?
[EDIT]: I should precise that I do not want to use wchar_t type and that strings I handle are UTF-8 encoded (I am aware this choice can be discussed but this an irrelevant debate)
UTF-8 is designed in such a way that it is immune to partial mismatch of character as shown above and cause any false positive. So it is completely safe to use strstr with UTF-8 coded multibyte characters.
strstr is not suitable for strings containing multi-byte characters.
If you are searching for a string that doesn't contain multi-byte character inside a string that contains multi-byte character, it may give false positive. (While using shift-jis encoding in japanese locale, strstr("掘something", "@some") may give false positive)
+---------+----+----+----+
| c1 | c2 | c3 | c4 | <--- string
+---------+----+----+----+
+----+----+----+
| c5 | c2 | c3 | <--- string to search
+----+----+----+
If trailing part of c1 (accidentally) matches with c5, you may get incorrect result. I would suggest using unicode with unicode substring check function or multibyte substring check functions. (_mbsstr for example)