I have attempted to print extended characters in C using printf and wprintf and have not been successful. Simple line of code for a block (Unicode 2588) character is: wprintf (L"█");
Using setlocale has not helped.
Whatever character I try to print, whether selected from Character Viewer or by using the Unicode number, appears to be masked to char size.
Can someone please provide an example of how to accomplish this?
Mac mini, macOS 10.15
Thanks for verifying this on your system.
After reviewing my code I finally remembered something that is probably causing my problem (It has been a while since I looked at this project). I have an AppDelegate Class that has some Objective-C code (see below) that sets up a stdout pipe and notification to route printf output to a UI Window Text View. It is now clear to me that the printf output is being affected by the pipe when it comes to Unicode characters. All printf output to this view works correctly otherwise.
As you can see above , the string encoding parameter was set to NSASCIIStringEncoding.
I changed it to NSUTF8StringEncoding. Now it works perfectly!
Thank you both very much for your help.
Thanks for verifying this on your system.
After reviewing my code I finally remembered something that is probably causing my problem (It has been a while since I looked at this project). I have an AppDelegate Class that has some Objective-C code (see below) that sets up a stdout pipe and notification to route printf output to a UI Window Text View. It is now clear to me that the printf output is being affected by the pipe when it comes to Unicode characters. All printf output to this view works correctly otherwise.
As you can see above , the string encoding parameter was set to NSASCIIStringEncoding.
I changed it to NSUTF8StringEncoding. Now it works perfectly!
Thank you both very much for your help.
In Terminal.app, open preferences > profiles > advanced, ensure your terminal is set to xterm-256color, and your text encoding set to Unicode UTF-8, and open a new tab, and try again.
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <locale.h>
int main(void)
{
setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
printf("❄️\n");
printf("%s", u8"🍁\n");
exit( EXIT_SUCCESS );
}
$ /Users/MrHoffman/Library/Developer/Xcode/DerivedData/.../C\ tests
❄️
🍁
$ locale
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_TIME="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_ALL=
$
With C, you get to tangle directly with Unicode, with ASCII and its UTF-8 superset, and with wchar_t encoding for both. Given my choice here, I'd run with UTF-8 directly and avoid wchar_t. UTF-8 is multi-byte, so don't assume that one character, err, that one glyph is one byte, because that only works with ASCII, and which means strlen and sizeof and buffer allocations can all provide run-time surprises.
This is easier in ObjC and Swift, if either are options here.
Here you go...
#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>
#include <locale.h>
int main(void)
{
setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
wprintf(L"█\n");
return 0;
}
E. Seagull wrote:
I am using Xcode to compile this code and I now suspect that a Build Setting is preventing this from working properly. Do you have any suggestions?
The Xcode console is not a real console. It is probably using UTF-8 internally. If you escape the character with something like "\u2588" then it will print correctly.
E. Seagull wrote:
I am baffled why this does not work.
It does work.
/tmp $ clang -o wtest test.c
/tmp $ ./wtest
█
/tmp $
I used Xcode on Monterey (as should be apparent from the path shown in my reply, and that path accessed via Xcode show-in-finder), built using a C command-line app, and used the cited settings within Terminal, and the shell output was as indicated in the command output shown. It worked.
Thank you for your quick reply.
I tried exactly what you provided but still no output. It appears that what is happening is a null is printed, essentially terminating the output string. Not even the \n is printed.
I am baffled why this does not work.
I confirmed Terminal preferences and locale settings.
As I replied to etresoft, using Terminal does work. I think my problem lies elsewhere.
I am using Xcode to compile this code and I now suspect that a Build Setting is preventing this from working properly. Do you have any suggestions?
Objective C is easier here and deals directly with UTF-8, as does Swift, and rather fewer of the C-related UTF-8 shenanigans are required for displaying command-line UTF-8 output, save having a terminal device or terminal emulator capable of displaying UTF-8.
Indeed it does.
Using Terminal to compile and execute works fine.
Thanks for your help.
How to Print Extended Characters Using printf in C