Strange display EOF character in the windows console

Question

Recently faced with an interesting interpretation of the EOF character console windows. On some machines running windows 7 code putchar (255) && putchar (-1) is displayed as a space character, and some as 'a' character. The second confuses me. Tell me please, why is this happening?

score 2 · Answer 1 · answered Oct 05 '13 at 08:29

2

The actual value of EOF is system-dependent (but is commonly -1, such as in glibc) and is unequal to any valid character code.

answered Oct 05 '13 at 08:29

Sadique

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I know about system-dependending EOF value, but whether to displaying of -1 code depend from compiler or console settings in windows? – iGriffer Oct 05 '13 at 08:37
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The value of `EOF` is equal to any Character code. So the result can be anything in the world. So loosely speaking - yes, it may have happened due to the way your compiler has been implemented. – Sadique Oct 05 '13 at 08:42

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 05 '13 at 09:05

EOF is not a character, it's more like a signal (not the Unix signal) indicating End-of-File. Is value is implementation dependent, but guaranteed to be unequal to any valid character, usually -1.

When you use putchar(EOF), or putchar(-1), it's converted to unsigned char, 255. But the ASCII value 255 isn't a printable character, the result varies in different machines.

Strange display EOF character in the windows console

2 Answers2