Question

I’m a new to Obj-C (my experience is in Java and a little C)

I have this project these days, which is An Arabic-Text encryption .. I need to read an arabic text file (character by character), but when I want to use these characters and store them in variables (of type char) I couldn’t .. it gives me this warning “Multi-character character constant” on this line :

char c = ‘ب’; // here I’m trying to store the letter “Bah” in a char variable

I think it’s an encoding problem, but I don’t know what exactly the problem is, and I spent the last 2 days looking for a solution, but couldn’t find one 🙁 ..

Thanks in advance 🙂

Answer 1

The chracter viewer tells me your character is unicode number 0x628. It’s too big to store in a single char which is only 8 bits. The good news is that it will fit in a unichar so:

unichar c = 'ب';

might work. But the compiler doesn’t guarantee to be able to handle characters outside a limited character set. For safety you might want to use the UTF-16 encoding explicitly (this is what NSStrings use internally. So:

unichar c = 0x628; // Arabic Beh (UTF-16)

Or if you prefer UTF-8, the UTF-8 encoding for that unicode number is D8 A8:

char c[2] = { 0xD8, 0xA8 };  // Arabic Beh (UTF-8)

Edit:

Some ways to get the character into an NSString:

Use -stringWithFormat:

NSString* foo = [NSString stringWithFormat: @"beh %C", (unichar) 0x628];

Or

NSString* foo = [NSString stringWithUTF8String: "beh \xD8\xAB"];