The `A` functions use Ansi (not ASCII) strings as input and output, and the `W` functions use Unicode string instead (UCS-2 on NT4 and earlier, UTF-16 on W2K and later).  [Refer to MSDN][1] for more details.

[1]: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/learnwin32/working-with-strings

I am needing to stub the response of a `current_user` method in an Rspec/capybara request spec. The method is defined in `ApplicationController` and is using helper_method. The method should simply return a user id. Within the test, I&#39;d like this method to return the same user id each time. 

Alternatively, I could fix my problem by setting `session[:user_id]` in the spec (which is what `current_user` returns)... but that doesn&#39;t seem to work either. 

Are either of these possible?

Edit:

Here is what I&#39;ve got (it is not working. It just runs the normal current_user method).


    require &#39;spec_helper&#39;

    describe &quot;Login&quot; do
  
       before(:each) do
         ApplicationController.stub(:current_user).and_return(User.first)
       end
  
      it &quot;logs in&quot; do
        visit &#39;/&#39;
        page.should have_content(&quot;Hey there user!&quot;)
      end
  
    end


Also not working:

    require &#39;spec_helper&#39;

    describe &quot;Login&quot; do
  
      before(:each) do
        @mock_controller = mock(&quot;ApplicationController&quot;) 
        @mock_controller.stub(:current_user).and_return(User.first)
      end

      it &quot;logs in&quot; do
        visit &#39;/&#39;
        page.should have_content(&quot;Hey there user!&quot;)
      end
  
    end


How to stub ApplicationController method in request spec

This were the only two questions I couldn&#39;t answer in the interview I got rejected from last night.

When should you use multithreading? And would multi threading be beneficial if the different threads execute mutually independent tasks?

What is the difference in calling the Win32 API function that have an `A` character appended to the end as opposed to the `W` character.

I know it means `ASCII` and `WIDE CHARACTER` or Unicode, but what is the difference in the output or the input?

For example, If I call GetDefaultCommConfigA, will it fill my COMMCONFIG structure with ASCII strings instead of WCHAR strings?  (Or vice-versa for GetDefaultCommConfigW)

In other words, how do I know what Encoding the string is in, ASCII or UNICODE, it *must* be by the version of the function I call `A` or `W`? Correct?

I have found this [question][1], but I don&#39;t think it answers my question.


  [1]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4143110/what-encoding-win32-api-functions-expect

What is the difference between the `A` and `W` functions in the Win32 API?

What is the difference in calling the Win32 API function that have an <code>A</code> character appended to the end as opposed to the <code>W</code> character.
I know it means <code>ASCII</code> and <code>WIDE CHARACTER</code> or Unicode, but what is the difference in the output or the input?
For example, If I call GetDefaultCommConfigA, will it fill my COMMCONFIG structure with ASCII strings instead of WCHAR strings? (Or vice-versa for GetDefaultCommConfigW)
In other words, how do I know what Encoding the string is in, ASCII or UNICODE, it must be by the version of the function I call <code>A</code> or <code>W</code>? Correct?
I have found this <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4143110/what-encoding-win32-api-functions-expect" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">question</a>, but I don't think it answers my question.

Watching the //BUILD stuff, I saw that WinRT API&#39;s can be consumed by C code:

![enter image description here][1]

I am rather excited about a fresh C API available to Win32 developers.  

Where can I find information on the C WinRT API?  How is it better than the existing Win32 C API?


  [1]: http://i.stack.imgur.com/L4W0H.jpg

Using WinRT from C?

In a situation where you have the UI frontend built using the new Metro style of apps for windows 8, and would like it to communicate with a .NET application running on the desktop on the same local machine (e.g. a windows service app).

What forms of interprocess communication are available between the metro app and the desktop app?

Thanks to Pavel Minaev of the Visual Studio team, who has provided some initial info here in a comment, quoted:

&gt; According to Martyn Lovell, there isn&#39;t any deliberate mechanism for
&gt; that, and some that could be used for it are intentionally restricted.
&gt; Named pipes aren&#39;t there, for example, nor are memory mapped files.
&gt; There are sockets (including server sockets), but when connecting to
&gt; localhost, you can only connect to the same app. You could use normal
&gt; files in one of the shared &quot;known folders&quot; (Documents, Pictures etc),
&gt; but that is a fairly crude hack that necessitates polling and is
&gt; visible to the user. -- [Pavel Minaev](https://stackoverflow.com/users/111335/pavel-minaev) commenting on [this issue](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7416826/how-does-the-new-windows-8-runtime-compare-to-silverlight-and-wpf)

So failing normal approaches I was thinking of using web services or reading/writing to a database in order to get some form of communication happening, both of which seem like overkill when the processes are running on the same machine.

Is what I&#39;m attempting here making sense? I can see a need for a metro app to be the frontend UI for an existing service which is running on the desktop. Or is it better to just use WPF for the frontend UI running on the desktop (i.e. a non-metro app).

How can a Metro app in Windows 8 communicate with a backend desktop app on the same machine?

I&#39;ve tried implementing a function like this, but unfortunately it doesn&#39;t work:

    const wchar_t *GetWC(const char *c)
    {
        const size_t cSize = strlen(c)+1;
        wchar_t wc[cSize];
        mbstowcs (wc, c, cSize);

        return wc;
    }

My main goal here is to be able to integrate normal char strings in a Unicode application. Any advice you guys can offer is greatly appreciated.

How to convert char* to wchar_t*?

What is the difference between malloc() and HeapAlloc()? As far as I understand malloc allocates memory from the heap, just as HeapAlloc, right?

So what is the difference?


Thanks!

malloc() vs. HeapAlloc()

I&#39;m having a little look at .dll files, I understand their usage and I&#39;m trying to understand how to use them.

I have created a .dll file that contains a function that returns an integer named funci()

using this code, I (think) I&#39;ve imported the .dll file into the project(there&#39;s no complaints):

    #include &lt;windows.h&gt;
    #include &lt;iostream&gt;

    int main() {
      HINSTANCE hGetProcIDDLL = LoadLibrary(&quot;C:\\Documents and Settings\\User\\Desktop  \\fgfdg\\dgdg\\test.dll&quot;);

      if (hGetProcIDDLL == NULL) {
        std::cout &lt;&lt; &quot;cannot locate the .dll file&quot; &lt;&lt; std::endl;
      } else {
        std::cout &lt;&lt; &quot;it has been called&quot; &lt;&lt; std::endl;
        return -1;
      }
    
      int a = funci();

      return a;
    }

    # funci function 

    int funci() {
      return 40;
    }

However when I try to compile this .cpp file that I think has imported the .dll I have the following error: 

    C:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop\fgfdg\onemore.cpp||In function &#39;int main()&#39;:|
    C:\Documents and Settings\User\Desktop\fgfdg\onemore.cpp|16|error: &#39;funci&#39; was not     declared in this scope|
    ||=== Build finished: 1 errors, 0 warnings ===|

I know a .dll is different from a header file so I know I can&#39;t import a function like this but it&#39;s the best I could come up with to show that I&#39;ve tried.

My question is, how can I use the `hGetProcIDDLL` pointer to access the function within the .dll. 

I hope this question makes sense and I&#39;m not barking up some wrong tree yet again.







Dynamically load a function from a DLL

Just curious, because I just realized it wasn&#39;t an actual &quot;x&quot; (annoying how long that took to figure out).

What is the unicode character for the close symbol used by Twitter bootstrap?

I have this error:

    Traceback (most recent call last):
      File &quot;python_md5_cracker.py&quot;, line 27, in &lt;module&gt;
      m.update(line)
    TypeError: Unicode-objects must be encoded before hashing

when I try to execute this code in **Python 3.2.2**:

	import hashlib, sys
	m = hashlib.md5()
	hash = &quot;&quot;
	hash_file = input(&quot;What is the file name in which the hash resides?  &quot;)
	wordlist = input(&quot;What is your wordlist?  (Enter the file name)  &quot;)
	try:
	  hashdocument = open(hash_file, &quot;r&quot;)
	except IOError:
	  print(&quot;Invalid file.&quot;)
	  raw_input()
	  sys.exit()
	else:
	  hash = hashdocument.readline()
	  hash = hash.replace(&quot;\n&quot;, &quot;&quot;)

	try:
	  wordlistfile = open(wordlist, &quot;r&quot;)
	except IOError:
	  print(&quot;Invalid file.&quot;)
	  raw_input()
	  sys.exit()
	else:
	  pass
	for line in wordlistfile:
      # Flush the buffer (this caused a massive problem when placed 
      # at the beginning of the script, because the buffer kept getting
      # overwritten, thus comparing incorrect hashes)
	  m = hashlib.md5()
	  line = line.replace(&quot;\n&quot;, &quot;&quot;)
	  m.update(line)
	  word_hash = m.hexdigest()
	  if word_hash == hash:
	    print(&quot;Collision! The word corresponding to the given hash is&quot;, line)
	    input()
	    sys.exit()

	print(&quot;The hash given does not correspond to any supplied word in the wordlist.&quot;)
	input()
	sys.exit()

How to correct TypeError: Unicode-objects must be encoded before hashing?

The [ICU project](http://userguide.icu-project.org/transforms/normalization) (which also now has a [PHP library](http://us.php.net/manual/en/class.normalizer.php)) contains the classes needed to help normalize UTF-8 strings to make it easier to compare values when searching.

However, I&#39;m trying to figure out [what this means](http://unicode.org/reports/tr15/) for applications. For example, in which cases do I want &quot;Canonical Equivalence&quot; instead of &quot;Compatibility equivalence&quot;, or vis-versa?

What is normalized UTF-8 all about?

I&#39;ve been looking at the command line generated by Visual Studio, and for one of my project it defines two symbols: `_UNICODE` and `UNICODE`.  Now if I understand this document [this rather old ][1] document, the `_UNICODE` symbol is a VC++ thing that causes certain standard functions to use `wchar_t` instead of `char` in their interfaces.   

But what does the `UNICODE` without an underscore mean?


  [1]: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc194799.aspx

Why both UNICODE and _UNICODE?

How can I convert, in Java, the ASCII code (which is an integer from [0, 255] range) to its corresponding ASCII character?

For example: 

    65  -&gt; &quot;A&quot;
    102 -&gt; &quot;f&quot;

How to convert ASCII code (0-255) to its corresponding character?

I am using django to build a simple website. When you type the base address (which for now is `127.0.0.1:8000/`), I use django to show a view which does some checks and redirects you based on your user privileges. (If you have admin privileges, you go to `/admin`, if you don&#39;t you go to `/home`, and if you aren&#39;t logged in you go to `/login`.)

When I make that HTTP request, I get redirected *as I should* but I also see the following two errors in my django log:

 1. code 400, message Bad request syntax `(&#39;\x16\x03\x01\x00\x95\x01\x00\x00\x91\x03\x01N\xaa\x9c\x08\x96\x7f\x92\xe9Z\x925\xcaY4\xa6\xa5\xab\xf2\x16\xfaT\x89\xe7\x8a\xc3\x99J)6\xfb\xc44\x00\x00H\xc0&#39;)`
 2. `&quot;??N????Z?5?Y4?????T??&#217;J)6??4H?&quot; 400 -`

I translated the hex in the first one to be (spaces added for legibility): `SYN ETX NUL NUL U SOH NUL NUL Q ETX NUL N 170 156 X r 246 STX 141 214 ? 143 EOT FS j 142 223 s 241 220 &lt; 185 \ \ m 242 &amp;`

I can certainly see why the server wouldn&#39;t like that as a request, but I have no idea where it&#39;s coming from.

Any ideas?

Thanks very much.

==============

Here is the code for the view:


    def index(request):
        user = request.user
        admin_courses = []

        if (user.is_authenticated()):
            u_id = user.getUserId()
            my_enrollment = Enrollment.objects.filter(user_id=u_id)
            admin_enrollment = my_enrollment.filter(type=&quot;ADMIN&quot;)
            for enr in admin_enrollment:
                course = Course.objects.get(id=enr.getCourseId())
                admin_courses.append(course)
            if (len(admin_courses)&gt;0):
                return HttpResponseRedirect(&#39;/admin&#39;)
            else:
                return HttpResponseRedirect(&#39;/home&#39;)
        return HttpResponseRedirect(&#39;/login&#39;)


Django: 400 bad request syntax - what does this message mean?

I am interested in taking in a single character.

    c = &#39;c&#39; # for example
    hex_val_string = char_to_hex_string(c)
    print hex_val_string

output:

    63

What is the simplest way of going about this? Any predefined string library stuff?

How do I convert a single character into its hex ASCII value in Python?

How would you convert a string to ASCII values? 

For example, &quot;hi&quot; would return `[104 105]`.

I can individually do ord(&#39;h&#39;) and ord(&#39;i&#39;), but it&#39;s going to be troublesome when there are a lot of letters. 

Convert string to ASCII value python

I&#39;m working with a .txt file. I want a string of the text from the file with no non-ASCII characters. However, I want to leave spaces and periods. At present, I&#39;m stripping those too. Here&#39;s the code:

    def onlyascii(char):
        if ord(char) &lt; 48 or ord(char) &gt; 127: return &#39;&#39;
        else: return char
    
    def get_my_string(file_path):
        f=open(file_path,&#39;r&#39;)
        data=f.read()
        f.close()
        filtered_data=filter(onlyascii, data)
        filtered_data = filtered_data.lower()
        return filtered_data

How should I modify onlyascii() to leave spaces and periods? I imagine it&#39;s not too complicated but I can&#39;t figure it out.

Content Type	Original Author	Original Content on Stackoverflow
Question	Questionaire	View Question on Stackoverflow
Solution 1 - Winapi	Remy Lebeau	View Answer on Stackoverflow

What is the difference between the `A` and `W` functions in the Win32 API?

Winapi Problem Overview

Winapi Solutions

Solution 1 - Winapi

When should you use multithreading? And would multi threading be beneficial if the different threads execute mutually independent tasks?

How to stub ApplicationController method in request spec

Attributions