Question

Greetings,

I’m developing a project in C++ where I want to use characters like á é õ and ┌ ─ ┐ │ to draw a couple of nice frames. My doubt resides in what I should change in my code/project settings since, without any kind of modifications, the console just prints pseudo-random characters.

I know that the above characters are defined in the character set Code page 437 aka Extended ASCII, but what I should do know?

After some research, I included the instruction setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""); and now I can print accented characters (à é õ) but can’t print the borders.

Also, should I use char and string or wchar and wstring to use these characters?

Thanks

Answer 1

I think the best way to do it would be to use wchar and wstring for the characters – they are meant for locale-independant string operations and are defined as UTF-16 in Windows and as UTF-32 in Linux.

Note that you need to use the proper functions, for example wprintf instead of printf… If you’re using iostream, I think that should work out-of-the-box with wstrings.

EDIT: Note that it is not required for wchar_t to be unicode (in practice, it often is). If wchar_t (and thus, wstring) is unicode, then the C99 standard (and therefore most likely the C++ standard) states that __STDC_ISO_10646__ is to be defined.

In other words, if __STDC_ISO_10646__ is defined, then the wchar_t is unicode — as for the exact type (UTF-16 or UTF-32), you can use a sizeof(wchar_t).