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cunicodencurses

Printing a Unicode Symbol in C

I'm trying to print a unicode star character (0x2605) in a linux terminal using C. I've followed the syntax suggested by other answers on the site, but I'm not getting an output:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>

int main(){

    wchar_t star = 0x2605;
    wprintf(L"%c\n", star);

    return 0;
}

I'd appreciate any suggestions, especially how I can make this work with the ncurses library.

Solution

  • 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.