The wcsxfrm function transforms the string pointed to by ws2 and stores the resulting string in the array pointed to by ws1. No more than maxchar wide characters, including the null wide terminator, are placed into the array pointed to by ws1. If the value of maxchar is less than the required size to store the transformed string (including the terminating null), the contents of the array pointed to by ws1 is indeterminate. In such a case, the function returns the size of the transformed string. If maxchar is 0, then, ws1 is allowed to be a NULL pointer, and the function returns the required size of the ws1 array before making the transformation. The wide-character string comparison functions, wcscoll and wcscmp, can produce different results given the same two wide- character strings to compare. This is because wcscmp does a straightforward comparison of the code point values of the characters in the strings, whereas wcscoll uses the locale information to do the comparison. Depending on the locale, the wcscoll comparison can be a multipass operation, which is slower than wcscmp. The wcsxfrm function transforms wide-character strings in such a way that if you pass two transformed strings to the wcscmp function, the result is the same as passing the two original strings to the wcscoll function. The wcsxfrm function is useful in applications that need to do a large number of comparisons on the same wide-character strings using wcscoll. In this case, it may be more efficient (depending on the locale) to transform the strings once using wcsxfrm and then use the wcscmp function to do comparisons.