Printing a Unicode Symbol in C
Two problems: first of all, a wchar_t
must be printed with %lc
format, not %c
. The second one is that unless you call setlocale
the character set is not set properly, and you probably get ?
instead of your star. The following code seems to work though:
#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>
#include <locale.h>
int main() {
setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "");
wchar_t star = 0x2605;
wprintf(L"%lc\n", star);
}
And for ncurses
, just initialize the locale before the call to initscr
.
Whether you are using stdio or ncurses, you have to initialize the locale, as noted in the ncurses manual. Otherwise, multibyte encodings such as UTF-8 do not work.
wprintw
doesn't necessarily know about wchar_t
(though it may use the same underlying printf
, this depends on the platform and configuration).
With ncurses, you would display a wchar_t
in any of these ways:
- storing it in an array of
wchar_t
, and usingwaddwstr
, or - storing it in a
cchar_t
structure (withsetcchar
), and usingwadd_wch
with that as a parameter, or - converting the
wchar_t
to a multibyte string, and usingwaddstr