[c++] How to print Unicode character in C++?

I am trying to print a Russian "?" (U+0444 CYRILLIC SMALL LETTER EF) character, which is given a code of decimal 1092. Using C++, how can I print out this character? I would have thought something along the lines of the following would work, yet...

int main (){
   wchar_t f = '1060';
   cout << f << endl;
}

When compiling with -std=c++11, one can simply

  const char *s  = u8"\u0444";
  cout << s << endl;

I needed to show the string in UI as well as save that to an xml configuration file. The above specified format is good for string in c++, I would add we can have the xml compatible string for the special character by replacing "\u" by "&#x" and adding a ";" at the end.

For example : C++ : "\u0444" --> XML : "ф"

If you use Windows (note, we are using printf(), not cout):

//Save As UTF8 without signature
#include <stdio.h>
#include<windows.h>
int main (){
    SetConsoleOutputCP(65001); 
    printf("?\n");
}

Not Unicode but working - 1251 instead of UTF8:

//Save As Windows 1251
#include <iostream>
#include<windows.h>
using namespace std;
int main (){
    SetConsoleOutputCP(1251); 
    cout << "?" << endl;
}

Special thanks to the answer here for more-or-less the same question.

For me, all I needed was setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_US.UTF-8");

Then, I could use even raw wchar_t characters.

In Linux, I can just do:

std::cout << "?";

I just copy-pasted characters from here and it didn't fail for at least the random sample that I tried on.

Ultimately, this is completely platform-dependent. Unicode-support is, unfortunately, very poor in Standard C++. For GCC, you will have to make it a narrow string, as they use UTF-8, and Windows wants a wide string, and you must output to wcout.

// GCC
std::cout << "?";
// Windoze
wcout << L"?";

This code works in Linux (C++11, geany, g++ 7.4.0):

#include <iostream>

using namespace std;


int utf8_to_unicode(string utf8_code);
string unicode_to_utf8(int unicode);


int main()
{
    cout << unicode_to_utf8(36) << '\t';
    cout << unicode_to_utf8(162) << '\t';
    cout << unicode_to_utf8(8364) << '\t';
    cout << unicode_to_utf8(128578) << endl;

    cout << unicode_to_utf8(0x24) << '\t';
    cout << unicode_to_utf8(0xa2) << '\t';
    cout << unicode_to_utf8(0x20ac) << '\t';
    cout << unicode_to_utf8(0x1f642) << endl;

    cout << utf8_to_unicode("$") << '\t';
    cout << utf8_to_unicode("¢") << '\t';
    cout << utf8_to_unicode("€") << '\t';
    cout << utf8_to_unicode("") << endl;

    cout << utf8_to_unicode("\x24") << '\t';
    cout << utf8_to_unicode("\xc2\xa2") << '\t';
    cout << utf8_to_unicode("\xe2\x82\xac") << '\t';
    cout << utf8_to_unicode("\xf0\x9f\x99\x82") << endl;

    return 0;
}


int utf8_to_unicode(string utf8_code)
{
    unsigned utf8_size = utf8_code.length();
    int unicode = 0;

    for (unsigned p=0; p<utf8_size; ++p)
    {
        int bit_count = (p? 6: 8 - utf8_size - (utf8_size == 1? 0: 1)),
            shift = (p < utf8_size - 1? (6*(utf8_size - p - 1)): 0);

        for (int k=0; k<bit_count; ++k)
            unicode += ((utf8_code[p] & (1 << k)) << shift);
    }

    return unicode;
}


string unicode_to_utf8(int unicode)
{
    string s;

    if (unicode>=0 and unicode <= 0x7f)  // 7F(16) = 127(10)
    {
        s = static_cast<char>(unicode);

        return s;
    }
    else if (unicode <= 0x7ff)  // 7FF(16) = 2047(10)
    {
        unsigned char c1 = 192, c2 = 128;

        for (int k=0; k<11; ++k)
        {
            if (k < 6)  c2 |= (unicode % 64) & (1 << k);
            else c1 |= (unicode >> 6) & (1 << (k - 6));
        }

        s = c1;    s += c2;

        return s;
    }
    else if (unicode <= 0xffff)  // FFFF(16) = 65535(10)
    {
        unsigned char c1 = 224, c2 = 128, c3 = 128;

        for (int k=0; k<16; ++k)
        {
            if (k < 6)  c3 |= (unicode % 64) & (1 << k);
            else if (k < 12) c2 |= (unicode >> 6) & (1 << (k - 6));
            else c1 |= (unicode >> 12) & (1 << (k - 12));
        }

        s = c1;    s += c2;    s += c3;

        return s;
    }
    else if (unicode <= 0x1fffff)  // 1FFFFF(16) = 2097151(10)
    {
        unsigned char c1 = 240, c2 = 128, c3 = 128, c4 = 128;

        for (int k=0; k<21; ++k)
        {
            if (k < 6)  c4 |= (unicode % 64) & (1 << k);
            else if (k < 12) c3 |= (unicode >> 6) & (1 << (k - 6));
            else if (k < 18) c2 |= (unicode >> 12) & (1 << (k - 12));
            else c1 |= (unicode >> 18) & (1 << (k - 18));
        }

        s = c1;    s += c2;    s += c3;    s += c4;

        return s;
    }
    else if (unicode <= 0x3ffffff)  // 3FFFFFF(16) = 67108863(10)
    {
        ;  // actually, there are no 5-bytes unicodes
    }
    else if (unicode <= 0x7fffffff)  // 7FFFFFFF(16) = 2147483647(10)
    {
        ;  // actually, there are no 6-bytes unicodes
    }
    else  ;  // incorrect unicode (< 0 or > 2147483647)

    return "";
}

More:

• https://sites.google.com/view/technik-informatyk-nysa/porady/porady-c-cpp#h.p_lz0skneGFILy
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8

'1060' is four characters, and won't compile under the standard. You should just treat the character as a number, if your wide characters match 1:1 with Unicode (check your locale settings).

int main (){
    wchar_t f = 1060;
    wcout << f << endl;
}

Another solution in Linux:

string a = "?";
cout << "? = \xd0\xa4 = " << hex
     << int(static_cast<unsigned char>(a[0]))
     << int(static_cast<unsigned char>(a[1])) << " (" << a.length() << "B)" << endl;

string b = "v";
cout << "v = \xe2\x88\x9a = " << hex
     << int(static_cast<unsigned char>(b[0]))
     << int(static_cast<unsigned char>(b[1]))
     << int(static_cast<unsigned char>(b[2])) << " (" << b.length() << "B)" << endl;