a UTF-16 encoded string
the maximum length (number of #gunichar2) of @str to use. If @len < 0, then the string is nul-terminated.
location to store number of words read, or %NULL. If %NULL, then %G_CONVERT_ERROR_PARTIAL_INPUT will be returned in case @str contains a trailing partial character. If an error occurs then the index of the invalid input is stored here.
location to store number of bytes written, or %NULL. The value stored here does not include the trailing 0 byte.
a pointer to a newly allocated UTF-8 string. This value must be freed with g_free(). If an error occurs, %NULL will be returned and @error set.
GException on failure.
Convert a string from UTF-16 to UTF-8. The result will be terminated with a 0 byte.
Note that the input is expected to be already in native endianness, an initial byte-order-mark character is not handled specially. g_convert() can be used to convert a byte buffer of UTF-16 data of ambiguous endianess.
Further note that this function does not validate the result string; it may e.g. include embedded NUL characters. The only validation done by this function is to ensure that the input can be correctly interpreted as UTF-16, i.e. it doesn't contain things unpaired surrogates.