I noticed my code didn’t output enough padding spaces, one short in my case. I have such code as follows,

wchar_t *wchar_text = L"Juli - Ein Gruß";
printf("012345678901234567890\n");
printf("|%-20ls|\n", wchar_text);

It outputs:

012345678901234567890
|Juli - Ein Gruß    |

There should be five spaces not just four. I guess printf() still count the bytes of the string even I gives %ls and "ß" is two bytes in UTF-8 encoding. So the length of bytes is 16, therefore only 4 space are padded.

Since I need to output in UTF-8, not UTF-32, I can’t just simply replace printf with wprintf.

My solution is

wchar_t buf[21] = L"";
swprintf(buf, 21, L"%-20ls", wchar_text);
printf("|%ls|\n", buf);

I use swprintf with a text buffer to do padding in wide-char, then printf with that text buffer instead of the original text.