differing sizes of wchar_t

I hope I'm missing something obvious here ...

My app reads text data over a socket. It's actually done via libcurl (http://curl.haxx.se) but that doesn't matter here; the point is that I am presented with a void * pointing to a block of raw data and a long giving the number of bytes in the block, and that's it.

However, since my app comprises both server and client I (the client) know the data is line-oriented text. All it needs to do is break it into lines and print them to stdout, skipping certain lines. This is not hard, using a bunch of <string.h> routines like strchr and strstr, plus fputs(). I have this all working - when the text is 8-bit ASCII.

But for full generality I'd like the server to deliver text in the UCS-2 charset (Unicode). I figured handling this on the client side would be a simple matter of transposing char to wchar_t and strlen() to wcslen(), etc. But it turns out that wchar_t on my platform (and on many, including Linux and Solaris) is 4 bytes wide. So I've got a stream of 16-bit characters from the server, and mechanisms for handling 8- and 32-bit character streams on the client!

Is there a common/elegant solution here? I could allocate a buffer twice as big as the incoming data and promote to 4-byte chars before operating on it but that would be inelegant to say the least. Not to mention the platforms where wchar_t is 2 bytes. I guess I could pass sizeof(wchar_t) to the server and have it respond with 2- or 4-byte data based on that, but that would mean a doubling of bandwidth consumption. What do people usually do about this "impedance mismatch"?

Thanks,
Henry Townsend
.

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