How to compare multibyte characters in C

Question

I try to parse text and find some characters in it. I use the code below. It works with normal characters like abcdef but it does not work with öçşğüı

Answer 1

There are no standards surrounding embedding non-ASCII characters directly in your source file.

Instead, the C11 standard specifies that you can use Unicode code points:

wchar_t text[] = L"\u00f6\u00e7\u015f\u0131\u011f";

// Print whole string
wprintf(L"%s\n", text);

// Test individual characters
for (size_t i = 0; text[i]; ++i)
{
    if ( text[i] == u'\u00f6' )
        // whatever...
}

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If you are in Windows then you face an extra problem that the Windows console can't print Unicode characters by default. You need to do the following:

• Change the console to use a TrueType monospaced font which includes glyphs for the characters you are trying to print. (I used "DejaVu Sans Mono" for this example)
• In the source code, call the function _setmode(1, _O_WTEXT); , which will need #include .

To restore normal text afterwards you can _setmode(1, _O_TEXT);.

Of course, if you are outputting to a file or to a Win32 API function then you don't need to do those steps.