Unicode problems in C++ but not C

Question

I\'m trying to write unicode strings to the screen in C++ on Windows. I changed my console font to Lucida Console and I set the output to CP_UTF8 a

Answer 1

It's more surprising that C implementation does work here than that C++ doesn't. char can contain only one byte (numerical values 0-255) and thus console should show only ASCII characters.

C must be doing some magic for you here - in fact it guesses that these bytes from outside the ASCII range (which is 0-127) you're providing form an Unicode (probably UTF-8) multi-byte character. C++ just displays each byte of your const char[] array, and since UTF bytes treated separately don't have distinct glyphs in your font, it puts these �. Note that you assign 6 letters and get 12 question marks.

You can read about UTF-8 and ASCII encoding if you want, but the point is that std::wstring and std::wcout is really the best solution designed to handle larger-than-byte characters.

(If you're not using Latin characters at all, you don't even save memory when you use char-based solutions such as const char[] and std::string instead of std::wstring. All these Cyrillic codes have to take some space anyway).