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cutf-8asciilocalewchar-t

Assigning non-ASCII characters to wide char and printing with printf


How can I assign non-ASCII characters to a wide char and print it to the console? This code down doesn't work:

#include <stdio.h>
int main(void)
{
    wchar_t wc = L'ć';
    printf("%lc\n", wc);
    printf("%ld\n", wc);
    return 0;
}

Output:

263
Press [Enter] to close the terminal ...

I'm using MinGW GCC on Windows 7.


Solution

  • I think your calls to printf() fail with an «Illegal byte sequence» error returned in errno, at least that is what happens here on MacOS X with the above example code (and also if using wprintf() instead of printf()). For me it works when I call setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); before the call to printf() so that it stops using the C locale by default:

    #include <stdio.h>
    #include <stdlib.h>
    #include <locale.h>
    int main(void)
    {
        wchar_t wc = L'ć';
    
        setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
        printf("%lc\n", wc);
    
        return 0;
    }
    

    It is unclear what platform/compiler you are on, so YMMV.