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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-16T07:18:50+00:00

I have this simple code: #include <iostream> #include <fstream> using namespace std; int main(void)

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I have this simple code:

#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>

using namespace std;

int main(void)
{
    ifstream in("file.txt");
    string line;
    while (getline(in, line))
    {
        cout << line << "    starts with char: " << line.at(0) << " " << (int) line.at(0) << endl;
    }
    in.close();
    return 0;
}

which prints:

  0.000000 0.000000 0.010909 0.200000    starts with char:   32
A 0.023636 0.000000 0.014545 0.200000    starts with char: A 65
B 0.050909 0.000000 0.014545 0.200000    starts with char: B 66
C 0.078182 0.000000 0.014545 0.200000    starts with char: C 67

...

, 0.152727 0.400000 0.003636 0.200000    starts with char: , 44
< 0.169091 0.400000 0.005455 0.200000    starts with char: < 60
. 0.187273 0.400000 0.003636 0.200000    starts with char: . 46
> 0.203636 0.400000 0.005455 0.200000    starts with char: > 62
/ 0.221818 0.400000 0.010909 0.200000    starts with char: / 47
? 0.245455 0.400000 0.009091 0.200000    starts with char: ? 63
¡ 0.267273 0.400000 0.005455 0.200000    starts with char: � -62
£ 0.285455 0.400000 0.012727 0.200000    starts with char: � -62
¥ 0.310909 0.400000 0.012727 0.200000    starts with char: � -62
§ 0.336364 0.400000 0.009091 0.200000    starts with char: � -62
© 0.358182 0.400000 0.016364 0.200000    starts with char: � -62
® 0.387273 0.400000 0.018182 0.200000    starts with char: � -62
¿ 0.418182 0.400000 0.009091 0.200000    starts with char: � -62
À 0.440000 0.400000 0.012727 0.200000    starts with char: � -61
Á 0.465455 0.400000 0.014545 0.200000    starts with char: � -61

Strange… How can I get really the first character of the string?

Thanks in advance!

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    You are getting the first character in the string.

    But it looks like the string is a UTF-8 string (or possibly some other multibyte character format).

    This means each symbol (glyph) that os printed is made of 1 (or more characters).
    If it is UTF-8 then any character that is outside the ASCII (0-127) range is actually made up of 2 (or more characters) and the string printing code is correctly interpreting this. But it is not possible for the character printing code to correctly de-code a single character that is greater than 127.

    Personally I think dynamic width character formats are not a good idea to use internally in a program (they are OK for transport and storage) as they make string manipulation much more complex. I would recommend that you convert the string into a fixed width format for internal processing then convert it back to UTF-8 for storage.

    Personally I would use UTF-16 (or UTF-32 depending on what wchar_t is) internally (yes I know technically that UTF-16 is not fixed width but in all reasonable teaching circumstances it is fixed width (when we include sand-script then we may need to use UTF-32)). You just need to imbue the input/output stream with the appropriate codecvt facet for the automatic translation. Internally the code can then be manipulated as single characters use wchar_t type.

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