Question

Why is there no UTF-8 character literal in C11 or C++11 even though there are UTF-8 string literals? I understand that, generally-speaking, a character literal represents a single ASCII character which is identical to a single-octet UTF-8 code point, but neither C nor C++ says the encoding has to be ASCII.

Basically, if I read the standard right, there’s no guarantee that '0' will represent the integer 0x30, yet u8"0" must represent the char sequence 0x30 0x00.

EDIT:

I’m aware not every UTF-8 code point would fit in a char. Such a literal would only be useful for single-octet code points (aka, ASCII), so I guess calling it an “ASCII character literal” would be more fitting, so the question still stands. I just chose to frame the question with UTF-8 because there are UTF-8 string literals. The only way I can imagine portably guaranteeing ASCII values would be to write a constant for each character, which wouldn’t be so bad considering there are only 128, but still…

Answer 1

It is perfectly acceptable to write non-portable C code, and this is one of many good reasons to do so. Feel free to assume that your system uses ASCII or some superset thereof, and warn your users that they shouldn’t try to run your program on an EBCDIC system.

If you are feeling very generous, you can encode a check. The gperf program is known to generate code that includes such a check.

_Static_assert('0' == 48, "must be ASCII-compatible");

Or, for pre-C11 compilers,

extern int must_be_ascii_compatible['0' == 48 ? 1 : -1];

If you are on C11, you can use the u or U prefix on character constants, but not the u8 prefix…

/* This is useless, doesn't do what you want... */
_Static_assert(0, "this code is broken everywhere");
if (c == '々') ...

/* This works as long as wchar_t is UTF-16 or UTF-32 or UCS-2... */
/* Note: you shouldn't be using wchar_t, though... */
_Static_assert(__STDC_ISO_10646__, "wchar_t must be some form of Unicode");
if (c == L'々') ...

/* This works as long as char16_t is UTF-16 or UCS-2... */
_Static_assert(__STDC_UTF_16__, "char16_t must be UTF-16");
if (c == u'々') ...

/* This works as long as char32_t is UTF-32... */
_Static_assert(__STDC_UTF_32__, "char32_t must be UTF-32");
if (c == U'々') ...

There are some projects that are written in very portable C and have been ported to non-ASCII systems (example). This required a non-trivial amount of porting effort, and there’s no real reason to make the effort unless you know you want to run your code on EBCDIC systems.

On standards: The people writing the C standard have to contend with every possible C implementation, including some downright bizarre ones. There are known systems where sizeof(char) == sizeof(long), CHAR_BIT != 8, integral types have trap representations, sizeof(void *) != sizeof(int *), sizeof(void *) != sizeof(void (*)()), va_list are heap-allocated, etc. It’s a nightmare.

Don’t beat yourself up trying to write code that will run on systems you’ve never even heard of, and don’t search to hard for guarantees in the C standard.

For example, as far as the C standard is concerned, the following is a valid implementation of malloc:

void *malloc(void) { return NULL; }

Note that while u8"..." constants are guaranteed to be UTF-8, u"..." and U"..." have no guarantees except that the encoding is 16-bits and 32-bits per character, respectively, and the actual encoding must be documented by the implementation.

Summary: Safe to assume ASCII compatibility in 2012.