Printing unicode character in C

Question

I got some local language font installed in my system (windows 8 OS). Through character map tool in windows, i got to know the unicode for those characters for that particular font. All i wanted to print those character in command line through a C program.

For example: Assume greek letter alpha is represented with unicode u+0074.

Taking "u+0074" as an input, i would like my C program to output alpha character

Can anyone help me?

Answer 1

use the Unicode version of the WriteConsole function.

also, be sure to store the source code as UTF-8 with BOM, which is supported by both g++ and visual c++

---

Example, assuming that you want to present a greek alpha given its Unicode code in the form "u+03B1" (the code you listed stands for a lowercase "t"):

#include <stdlib.h>         // exit, EXIT_FAILURE, wcstol
#include <string>           // std::wstring
using namespace std;

#undef UNICODE
#define UNICODE
#include <windows.h>

bool error( char const s[] )
{
    ::FatalAppExitA( 0, s );
    exit( EXIT_FAILURE );
}

namespace stream_handle {
    HANDLE const output     = ::GetStdHandle( STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE );
}  // namespace stream_handle

void write( wchar_t const* const s, int const n )
{
    DWORD n_chars_written;
    ::WriteConsole(
        stream_handle::output,
        s,
        n,
        &n_chars_written,
        nullptr         // overlapped i/o structure
        )
        || error( "WriteConsole failed" );
}

int main()
{
    wchar_t const input[]    = L"u+03B1";
    wchar_t const ch        = wcstol( input + 2, nullptr, 16 );
    wstring const s         = wstring() + ch + L"\r\n";

    write( s.c_str(), s.length() );
}

Answer 2

There are several issues. If you're running in a console window, I'd convert the code to UTF-8, and set the code page for the window to 65001. Alternatively, you can use wchar_t (which is UTF-16 on Windows), output via std::wostream and set the code page to 1200. (According the the documentation I've found, at least. I've no experience with this, because my code has had to be portable, and on the other platforms I've worked on, wchar_t has been either some private 32 bit encoding, or UTF-32.)

Answer 3

First you should set TrueType font (Consolas) in console's Properties. Then this code should suffice in your case -

#include <stdio.h>
#include <tchar.h>

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <Windows.h>
#include <fstream>

//for _setmode()
#include <io.h>
#include <fcntl.h>
using namespace std;

int _tmain(int argc, _TCHAR* argv[])
{
    TCHAR tch[1];
    tch[0] = 0x03B1; 

    // Test1 - WriteConsole
    HANDLE hStdOut = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);
    if (hStdOut == INVALID_HANDLE_VALUE) return 1;
    DWORD dwBytesWritten;
    WriteConsole(hStdOut, tch, (DWORD)_tcslen(tch), &dwBytesWritten, NULL);
    WriteConsole(hStdOut, L"\n", 1, &dwBytesWritten, NULL);

    _setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_U16TEXT);

    // Test2 - wprintf
    _tprintf_s(_T("%s\n"),tch);
    // Test3 - wcout
    wcout << tch << endl;

    wprintf(L"\x03B1\n");

    if (wcout.bad())
    {
        _tprintf_s(_T("\nError in wcout\n"));
        return 1;
    }
    return 0;
}

MSDN -

setmode is typically used to modify the default translation mode of stdin and stdout, but you can use it on any file. If you apply _setmode to the file descriptor for a stream, call _setmode before performing any input or output operations on the stream.

Answer 4

In C there is the primitive type of wchar_t which defines a wide-character. There are also corresponding functions like strcat -> wstrcat. Of course it depends on the environment you are using. If you use Visual Studio have a look here.