pxcCHAR explanation

[Scott_W_1]

Could someone explain the rationale behind using pxcCHAR to store hand and finger data?

It proves tricky to work around pxcCHAR instead of just CHAR, but if there's a good reason... I'm all for it. 

I'm about to convert an array of type pxcCHAR to a dynamically sized array. Any explanations of pxcCHAR would be helpful.

[Alain_Labrie]

pxcCHAR  is a typedef for wchar_t.

Wide characters (wchar_t)  are used to support languages with more than 256 characters. Whereas char = 8bit = 256 character limit.

wchar_t size is compiler dependent so be careful when allocating dynamic arrays.

[Scott_W_1]

Thanks!

Here's the reason for thinking about creating a dynamic array:

I'm recording gesture parameters. When I first started, the pxcCHAR array was set to a size of 1000. It worked fine for recording one frame of a single parameter and displaying it in an edit box control. The parameter was local rotations of the finger joints. As soon as I added another parameter, the entire app crashed. I fixed it by setting the array size to 50000 (Probably overkill), but there may be times that I simply cannot predict the size of the array. 

Any suggestions?

Scott

[Alain_Labrie]

I would use an STL container like a vector and push data onto it. Then I would clear it when the data is no longer needed.

If you allocate your own data structure, remember that pxcCHAR is a wide character with compiler dependent size. So if you need to figure out how much memory your structure is consuming you have to do:

int size = sizeof(buffer)/sizeof(pxcCHAR) 

where buffer is your pxcCHAR array.

Good Luck