The two essential properties of CFString objects are an array of Unicode characters and a count of those characters. Several String Services functions not only obtain those properties, particularly the characters, but perform conversions to almost any desired format.
The
CFStringGetBytes
function, which gets the contents of a CFString object as a byte buffer, is described in The Basic Conversion Routines. It is described there instead of in this section because it has features that make it particularly suitable for encoding conversions.