Literals Overview

This document provides an overview of literals.

Purpose

Allows the simple creation of descriptors that contain read-only literal text.

Architectural relationships

Literal descriptors are not strictly part of the Descriptors API, as they are not derived from the descriptor type base class TDesC. However, they have conversion operators so that they can be passed to any functions which take const TDesC& or const TRefByValue<const TDesC> parameters.

Description

The API has two key concepts: literal descriptor, and literal descriptor constructor macro.

Literal descriptor

The literal descriptor stores literal text and provides operators to convert the text into a standard descriptor.

Literal descriptor constructor macro

The literal descriptor constructor macro provides a simple way to create a literal descriptor.

The constructor macro is provided by _LIT16 for wide strings, and _LIT8 for narrow strings. In Unicode builds, _LIT is equivalent to _LIT16.