Question

I’m trying to read and print a file that may or may not contain UTF-8 codes.

My example file contains:

hi
\u22a2
hey

My niave code:

    QFile file("/path/qteststream.txt");

    if(!file.open(QIODevice::ReadOnly | QIODevice::Text ))
        std::cout << "Fail" << std::endl;

    QTextStream stream(&file);
    QTextStream qout(stdout);
    stream.setAutoDetectUnicode(true);

    while(!stream.atEnd())
      qout << stream.readLine() << endl;

But obviously, Im doing something wrong. I’d expect \u22a2 to be printed as a unicode character, but the programm just prints the string. How can I make print such sequences as characters?

Answer 1

\u22a2 may be interpreted as a Unicode character by your C++ compiler, but things are different outside source code. In a text file, \u22a2 is merely 6 characters (\, u, 2, 2, a, and 2) in succession. Try pasting ⊢ directly into the text file.

If you intentionally have \u22a2 in the text file and want to convert it into a Unicode character, you may want to check this post.