How to print Unicode character in C++?

by

To represent the character you can use Universal Character Names (UCNs). The character ‘ф’ has the Unicode value U+0444 and so in C++ you could write it ‘\u0444’ or ‘\U00000444’. Also if the source code encoding supports this character then you can just write it literally in your source code.

// both of these assume that the character can be represented with
// a single char in the execution encoding
char b = '\u0444';
char a="ф"; // this line additionally assumes that the source character encoding supports this character

Printing such characters out depends on what you’re printing to. If you’re printing to a Unix terminal emulator, the terminal emulator is using an encoding that supports this character, and that encoding matches the compiler’s execution encoding, then you can do the following:

#include <iostream>

int main() {
    std::cout << "Hello, ф or \u0444!\n";
}

This program does not require that ‘ф’ can be represented in a single char. On OS X and most any modern Linux install this will work just fine, because the source, execution, and console encodings will all be UTF-8 (which supports all Unicode characters).

Things are harder with Windows and there are different possibilities with different tradeoffs.

Probably the best, if you don’t need portable code (you’ll be using wchar_t, which should really be avoided on every other platform), is to set the mode of the output file handle to take only UTF-16 data.

#include <iostream>
#include <io.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

int main() {
    _setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_U16TEXT);
    std::wcout << L"Hello, \u0444!\n";
}

Portable code is more difficult.

More Related Contents:

  1. How do I print a double value with full precision using cout?
  2. Output unicode strings in Windows console app
  3. WChars, Encodings, Standards and Portability
  4. Is TCHAR still relevant?
  5. ‘printf’ vs. ‘cout’ in C++
  6. std::cout won’t print
  7. Hide user input on password prompt [duplicate]
  8. How to make cout behave as in binary mode?
  9. When does cout flush?
  10. What is the difference between cout, cerr, clog of iostream header in c++? When to use which one?
  11. Output Unicode strings in Windows console
  12. No matching function – ifstream open()
  13. How can I pad an int with leading zeros when using cout
  14. How to open an std::fstream (ofstream or ifstream) with a unicode filename?
  15. How do you properly use WideCharToMultiByte
  16. Read Unicode UTF-8 file into wstring
  17. Overload handling of std::endl?
  18. How to cout a float number with n decimal places [duplicate]
  19. What is the header?
  20. Reading and writing a std::vector into a file correctly
  21. Why are C++ STL iostreams not “exception friendly”?
  22. How to use cin.fail() in c++ properly
  23. Is std::cout buffered?
  24. Is wchar_t needed for unicode support?
  25. Using char16_t and char32_t in I/O
  26. How can I print 0x0a instead of 0xa using cout?
  27. Specification of source charset encoding in MSVC++, like gcc “-finput-charset=CharSet”
  28. Wrapping FILE* with custom std::ostream
  29. Are there binary memory streams in C++
  30. How can I cin and cout some unicode text?

Leave a Comment