Print Unicode characters in C, using ncurses

Question

I have to draw a box in C, using ncurses;

First, I have defined some values for simplicity:

#define RB \"\\e(0\\x6a\\e(B\"  (ASCII 188,Right bottom,          


        

Answer 1

BTW, maybe I'm probably arriving somewhat late to the party but I'll give you some insight that might or not shed some light and skills for your "box drawing" needs.

As of 2020 I'm involved in a funny project on my own mixing Swift + Ncurses (under OSX for now, but thinking about mixing it with linux). Apparently it works flawlessly.

The thing is, as I'm using Swift, internally it all reduces to "importing .h and .c" files from some Darwin.ncurses library the MacOS Xcode/runtime offers.

That means (I hope) my newly acquired skills might be useful for you because apparently we're using the very same .h and .c files for our ncurses needs. (or at least they should be really similar)

Said that:

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As of now, I "ignored" ACS_corner chars (I can't find them under swift/Xcode/Darwin.ncurses runtime !!!) in favour of pure UTF "corner chars", which also exist in the unicode pointspace, look:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box-drawing_character

What does it mean? Whenever I want to use some drawing box chars around I just copy&paste pure UTF-8 chars into my strings, and I send these very strings onto addstr.

Why does it work? Because as someone also answered above, before initializing ncurses with initscr(), I just claimed "I want a proper locale support" in the form of a setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); line.

What did I achieve? Apparently pure magic. And very comfortable one, as I just copy paste box chars inside my normal strings. At least under Darwin.ncurses/OSX Mojave I'm getting, not only "bounding box chars", but also full UTF8 support.

Try the "setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); initscr();" approach and tell us if "drawing boxes" works also for you under a pure C environment just using UTF8 bounding box chars.

Greetings and happy ncursing!