How to initialize or assign 中文 to wstring? - c++

I tried to use L"string", but it doesn't work.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main(){
wstring wstr = L"你好";//[Error] converting to execution character set: Illegal byte sequence
wcout<<wstr<<endl;
}
Use wcin and input 中文 works fine.
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main(){
wstring wstr;
wcin>>wstr;//Input Chinese is OK
wcout<<wstr<<endl;
}
How to initialize or assign 中文 to wstring?
Edit: I tried some online compilers. They all can compile but all output "??".
e.g. cpp.sh jdoodle onlinegdb repl.it
Edit 2: I installed g++ i868 MinGW-W64 8.1.0. Use Visual Studio to save the cpp file as utf8 format. Then use command line to compile it. It still output nothing.

Your compiler clearly doesn't like Unicode characters in its source files. Try initializing your string with Unicode escapes, instead:
wstring wstr = L"\u4E2D\u6587"; // These MAY be the correct codes.
Where 4E2D and 6587 are replaced with the actual hexadecimal values for the characters you want. (Sorry, but I don't have access to a full Unicode table for Chinese characters: I tried pasting them into my compiler, and these are the values it gave me on translating.)
The Unicode values given are for the character string in your question (中文); for the (different - 你好) one in your posted code, use L"\u4F60\u597D".
Also see the answer by #MarekR.

This must be configuration issue!
Apparently your compiler uses different encoding then your file is written in!
Since you are using Windows most probably encoding of file on your machine is not UTF-8 (end you have copied this file to Linux), but something else.
Since gcc is more Linux friendly it may expect UTF-8 and you have an conflict.
This is common problem, since Windows for a long time did maintain some backward compatibility with DOS (where only single byte characters where allowed and system used code pages for respective languages).
As you can see here, most compilers with default settings do not have a problem with code which uses Chinese characters.
I do not see TCM-GCC 4.9.2 compiler on godbolt, but it is not very old gcc after all.
I recommend ensure that code is written in UTF-8 and compiler will treat sources as UTF-8 encoded.
Edit: Adding std::locale::global(std::locale("")); made your code properly displaying this string on godbolt.

I tried in Visual Studio. It works(outputs "你好") if I saved my C++ file to either Unicode or utf8 format. Can you try saving your c++ file to either Unicode or utf8?

Related

Can't display 'ä' in GLFW window title

glfwSetWindowTitle(win, "Nämen");
Becomes "N?men", where '?' is in a little black, twisted square, indicating that the character could not be displayed.
How do I display 'ä'?
If you want to use non-ASCII letters in the window title, then the string has to be utf-8 encoded.
GLFW: Window title:
The window title is a regular C string using the UTF-8 encoding. This means for example that, as long as your source file is encoded as UTF-8, you can use any Unicode characters.
If you see a little black, twisted square then this indicates that the ä is encoded with some iso encoding that is not UTF-8, maybe something like latin1. To fix this you need to open it in the editor in which you can change the encoding of the file, change it to uft-8 (without BOM) and fix the ä in the title.
It seems like the GLFW implementation does not work according to the specification in this case. Probably the function still uses Latin-1 instead of UTF-8.
I had the same problem on GLFW 3.3 Windows 64 bit precompiled binaries and fixed it like this:
SetWindowTextA(glfwGetWin32Window(win),"Nämen")
The issue does not lie within GLFW but within the compiler. Encodings are handled by the major compilers as follows:
Good guy clang assumes that every file is encoded in UTF-8
Trusty gcc checks the system's settings1 and falls back on UTF-8, when it fails to determine one.
MSVC checks for BOM and uses the detected encoding; otherwise it assumes that file is encoded using the users current code page2.
You can determine your current code page by simply running chcp in your (Windows) console or PowerShell. For me, on a fresh install of Windows 11, it yields "850" (language: English; keyboard: German), which stands for Code Page 850.
To fix this issue you have several solutions:
Change your systems code page. Arguably the worst solution.
Prefix your strings with u8, escape all unicode literals and convert the string to wide char before passing Win32 functions; e.g.:
const char* title = u8"\u0421\u043b\u0430\u0432\u0430\u0020\u0423\u043a\u0440\u0430\u0457\u043d\u0456\u0021";
// This conversion is actually performed by GLFW; see footnote ^3
const int l = MultiByteToWideChar(CP_UTF8, 0, title, -1, NULL, 0);
wchar_t* buf = _malloca(l * sizeof(wchar_t));
MultiByteToWideChar(CP_UTF8, 0, title, -1, buf, l);
SetWindowTextW(hWnd, buf);
_freea(buf);
Save your source files with UTF-8 encoding WITH BOM. This allows you to write your strings without having to escape them. You'll still need to convert the string to a wide char string using the method seen above.
Specify the /utf-8 flag when compiling; this has the same effect as the previous solution, but you don't need the BOM anymore.
The solutions stated above still require you convert your good and nice string to a big chunky wide string.
Another option would be to provide a manifest4 with the activeCodePage set to UTF-8. This way all Win32 functions with the A-suffix (e.g. SetWindowTextA) now accept and properly handle UTF-8 strings, if the running system is at least or newer than Windows Version 1903.
TL;DR
Compile your application with the /utf-8 flag active.
IMPORTANT: This works for the Win32 APIs. This doesn't let you magically write Unicode emojis to the console like a hipster JS developer.
1 I suppose it reads the LC_ALL setting on linux. In the last 6 years I have never seen a distribution, that does NOT specify UTF-8. However, take this information with a grain of salt; I might be entirely wrong on how gcc handles this now.
2 If no byte-order mark is found, it assumes that the source file is encoded in the current user code page [...].
3 GLFW performs the conversion as seen here.
4 More about Win32 ANSI-APIs, Manifest and UTF-8 can be found here.

C++ output Unicode in variable

I'm trying to output a string containing unicode characters, which is received with a curl call. Therefore, I'm looking for something similar to u8 and L options for literal strings, but than applicable for variables. E.g.:
const char *s = u8"\u0444";
However, since I have a string containing unicode characters, such as:
mit freundlichen Grüßen
When I want to print this string with:
cout << UnicodeString << endl;
it outputs:
mit freundlichen Gr??en
When I use wcout, it returns me:
mit freundlichen Gren
What am I doing wrong and how can I achieve the correct output. I return the output with RapidJSON, which returns the string as:
mit freundlichen Gr��en
Important to note, the application is a CGI running on Ubuntu, replying on browser requests
If you are on Windows, what I would suggest is using Unicode UTF-16 at the Windows boundary.
It seems to me that on Windows with Visual C++ (at least up to VS2015) std::cout cannot output UTF-8-encoded-text, but std::wcout correctly outputs UTF-16-encoded text.
This compilable code snippet correctly outputs your string containing German characters:
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <io.h>
#include <iostream>
int main()
{
_setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_U16TEXT);
// ü : U+00FC
// ß : U+00DF
const wchar_t * text = L"mit freundlichen Gr\u00FC\u00DFen";
std::wcout << text << L'\n';
}
Note the use of a UTF-16-encoded wchar_t string.
On a more general note, I would suggest you using the UTF-8 encoding (and for example storing text in std::strings) in your cross-platform C++ portions of code, and convert to UTF-16-encoded text at the Windows boundary.
To convert between UTF-8 and UTF-16 you can use Windows APIs like MultiByteToWideChar and WideCharToMultiByte. These are C APIs, that can be safely and conveniently wrapped in C++ code (more details can be found in this MSDN article, and you can find compilable C++ code here on GitHub).
On my system the following produces the correct output. Try it on your system. I am confident that it will produce similar results.
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
string s="mit freundlichen Grüßen";
cout << s << endl;
return 0;
}
If it is ok, then this points to the web transfer not being 8-bit clean.
Mike.
containing unicode characters
You forgot to specify which unicode encoding does the string contain. There is the "narrow" UTF-8, which can be stored in a std::string and printed using std::cout, as well as wider variants, which can't. It is crucial to know which encoding you're dealing with. For the remainder of my answer, I'm going to assume you want to use UTF-8.
When I want to print this string with:
cout << UnicodeString << endl;
EDIT:
Important to note, the application is a CGI running on Ubuntu, replying on browser requests
The concerns here are slightly different from printing onto a terminal.
You need to set the Content-Type response header appropriately or else the client cannot know how to interpret the response. For example Content-Type: application/json; charset=utf-8.
You still need to make sure that the source string is in fact the correct encoding corresponding to the header. See the old answer below for overview.
The browser has to support the encoding. Most modern browsers have had support for UTF-8 a long time now.
Answer regarding printing to terminal:
Assuming that
UnicodeString indeed contains an UTF-8 encoded string
and that the terminal uses UTF-8 encoding
and the font that the terminal uses has the graphemes that you use
the above should work.
it outputs:
mit freundlichen Gr??en
Then it appears that at least one of the above assumptions don't hold.
Whether 1. is true, you can verify by inspecting the numeric value of each code unit separately and comparing it to what you would expect of UTF-8. If 1. isn't true, then you need to figure out what encoding does the string actually use, and either convert the encoding, or configure the terminal to use that encoding.
The terminal typically, but not necessarily, uses the system native encoding. The first step of figuring out what encoding your terminal / system uses is to figure out what terminal / system you are using in the first place. The details are probably in a manual.
If the terminal doesn't use UTF-8, then you need to convert the UFT-8 string within your program into the character encoding that the terminal does use - unless that encoding doesn't have the graphemes that you want to print. Unfortunately, the standard library doesn't provide arbitrary character encoding conversion support (there is some support for converting between narrow and wide unicode, but even that support is deprecated). You can find the unicode standard here, although I would like to point out that using an existing conversion implementation can save a lot of work.
In the case the character encoding of the terminal doesn't have the needed grapehemes - or if you don't want to implement encoding conversion - is to re-configure the terminal to use UTF-8. If the terminal / system can be configured to use UTF-8, there should be details in the manual.
You should be able to test if the font itself has the required graphemes simply by typing the characters into the terminal and see if they show as they should - although, this test will also fail if the terminal encoding does not have the graphemes, so check that first. Manual of your terminal should explain how to change the font, should it be necessary. That said, I would expect üß to exist in most fonts.

Printing out Korean in console C++

I am having trouble with printing out korean.
I have tried various methods with no avail.
I have tried
1.
cout << "한글" << endl;
2.
wcout << "한글" << endl;
3.
wprintf(L"한글\n");
4.
setlocale(LC_ALL, "korean");
wprintf("한글");
and more. But all of those prints "한글".
I am using MinGW compiler, and my OS is windows 7.
P.S Strangely Java prints out Korean fine,
String kor = "한글";
System.out.println(kor);
works.
Set the console codepage to utf-8 before printing the text
::SetConsoleOutputCP(65001)
Since you are using Windows 7 you can use WriteConsoleW which is part of the windows API. #include <windows.h> and try the following code:
DWORD numCharsToWrite = str.length();
LPDWORD numCharsWritten = NULL;
WriteConsoleW(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), str.c_str(), numCharsToWrite, numCharsWritten, NULL);
where str is the is a std::wstring
More on WriteConsoleW: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms687401%28v=vs.85%29.aspx
After having tried other methods this worked for me.
Problem is that there are a lot of places where this could be broken.
Here is answer I've posted some time ago (covers Korean). Answear is for MSVC, but same applies to MinGW (compiler switches are different, locale name may be different).
Here are 5 traps which makes this hard:
Source code encoding. Source has to use encoding which supports all required characters. Nowadays UTF-8 is recommended. It is best to make sure your editor (IDE) is properly configure to enforce source encoding.
You have to inform compiler what is encoding of source file. For gcc it is: -finput-charset=utf-8 (it is default)
Encoding used by executable. You have to define what kind of encoding string literals should be encode in final executable. This encoding should also cover required characters. Here UTF-8 is also the best. Gcc option is -fexec-charset=utf-8
When you run application you have to inform standard library what kind of encoding your string literals are define in or what encoding in program logic is used. So somewhere in your code at beginning of execution you need something like this (here UTF-8 is enforced):
std::locale::global(std::locale{".utf-8"});
and finally you have to instruct stream what kind of encoding it should use. So for std::cout and std::cin you should set locale which is default for the system:
auto streamLocale = std::locale{""};
// this impacts date/time/floating point formats, so you may want tweak it just to use sepecyfic encoding and use C-loclae for formating
std::cout.imbue(streamLocale);
std::cin.imbue(streamLocale);
After this everything should work as desired without code which explicitly does conversions.
Since there are 5 places to make mistake, this is reason people have trouble with it and internet is full of "hack" solutions.
Note that if system is not configured for support all needed characters (for example wrong code page is set) then with thsi configuration characters which could not be converted will be replaced with question mark.

printing Unicode characters C++

I'm trying to write a simple command line app to teach myself Japanese, but can't seem to get Unicode characters to print. What am I missing?
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
wcout << L"こんにちは世界\n";
wcout << L"Hello World\n"
system("pause");
}
In this example only "Press any key to continue" is displayed. Tested on Visual C++ 2013.
This is not easy on Windows. Even when you manage to get the text to the Windows console you still need to configure cmd.exe to be able to display Japanese characters.
#include <iostream>
int main() {
std::cout << "こんにちは世界\n";
}
This works fine on any system where:
The compiler's source and execution encodings include the characters.
The output device (e.g., the console) expects text in the same encoding as the compiler's execution encoding.
A font with the appropriate characters is available (usually not a problem).
Most platforms these days use UTF-8 by default for all these encodings and so can support the entire Unicode range with code similar to the above. Unfortunately Windows is not one of these platforms.
wcout << L"こんにちは世界\n";
In this line the string literal data is (at compile time) converted from the source encoding to the execution wide encoding and then (at run time) wcout uses the locale it is imbued with to convert the wchar_t data to char data for output. Where things go wrong is that the default locale is only required to support characters from the basic source character set, which doesn't even include all ASCII characters, let alone non-ASCII characters.
So the conversion results in an error, putting wcout into a bad state. The error has to be cleared before wcout will function again, which is why the second print statement does not output anything.
You can work around this for a limited range of characters by imbuing wcout with a locale that will successfully convert the characters. Unfortunately the encoding that is needed to support the entire Unicode range this way is UTF-8; Although Microsoft's implementation of streams supports other multibyte encodings it very specifically does not support UTF-8.
For example:
wcout.imbue(std::locale(std::locale::classic(), new std::codecvt_utf8_utf16<wchar_t>()));
SetConsoleOutputCP(CP_UTF8);
wcout << L"こんにちは世界\n";
Here wcout will correctly convert the string to UTF-8, and if the output were written to a file instead of the console then the file would contain the correct UTF-8 data. However the Windows console, even though configured here to accept UTF-8 data, simply will not accept UTF-8 data written in this way.
There are a few options:
Avoid the standard library entirely:
DWORD n;
WriteConsoleW(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), L"こんにちは世界\n", 8, &n, nullptr);
Use non-standard magical incantation that will break standard code:
#include <fcntl.h>
#include <io.h>
_setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_U8TEXT);
std::wcout << L"こんにちは世界\n";
After setting this mode std::cout << "Hello, World"; will crash.
Use a low level IO API along with manual conversion:
#include <codecvt>
#include <locale>
SetConsoleOutputCP(CP_UTF8);
std::wstring_convert<std::codecvt_utf8_utf16<wchar_t>, wchar_t> convert;
std::puts(convert.to_bytes(L"こんにちは世界\n"));
Using any of these methods, cmd.exe will display the correct text to the best of its ability, by which I mean it will display unreadable boxes. Seven little boxes, for the given string.
You can copy the text out of cmd.exe and into notepad.exe or whatever to see the correct glyphs.
There's a whole article about dealing with Unicode in Windows console
http://alfps.wordpress.com/2011/11/22/unicode-part-1-windows-console-io-approaches/
http://alfps.wordpress.com/2011/12/08/unicode-part-2-utf-8-stream-mode/
Basically, you may implement you own streambuf for std::cout (or std::wcout) in terms of WriteConsoleW and enjoy writing UTF-8 (or whatever Unicode you want) to Windows console without depending on locales, console code pages and even without using wide characters.
It may not look very straightforward, but it's convenient and reusable solution, which is also able to give you a portable utf8-everywhere style user code. Please, don't beat me for my English :)
Or you can change Windows locale to Japanese.

UCS-2LE text file parsing

I have a text file which was created using some Microsoft reporting tool. The text file includes the BOM 0xFFFE in the beginning and then ASCII character output with nulls between characters (i.e "F.i.e.l.d.1."). I can use iconv to convert this to UTF-8 using UCS-2LE as an input format and UTF-8 as an output format... it works great.
My problem is that I want to read in lines from the UCS-2LE file into strings and parse out the field values and then write them out to a ASCII text file (i.e. Field1 Field2). I have tried the string and wstring-based versions of getline – while it reads the string from the file, functions like substr(start, length) do interpret the string as 8-bit values, so the start and length values are off.
How do I read the UCS-2LE data into a C++ String and extract the data values? I have looked at boost and icu as well as numerous google searches but have not found anything that works. What am I missing here? Please help!
My example code looks like this:
wifstream srcFile;
srcFile.open(argv[1], ios_base::in | ios_base::binary);
..
..
wstring srcBuf;
..
..
while( getline(srcFile, srcBuf) )
{
wstring field1;
field1 = srcBuf.substr(12, 12);
...
...
}
So, if, for example, srcBuf contains "W.e. t.h.i.n.k. i.n. g.e.n.e.r.a.l.i.t.i.e.s." then the substr() above returns ".k. i.n. g.e" instead of "g.e.n.e.r.a.l.i.t.i.e.s.".
What I want is to read in the string and process it without having to worry about the multi-byte representation. Does anybody have an example of using boost (or something else) to read these strings from the file and convert them to a fixed width representation for internal use?
BTW, I am on a Mac using Eclipse and gcc.. Is it possible my STL does not understand wide character strings?
Thanks!
Having spent some good hours tackling this question, here are my conclusions:
Reading an UTF-16 (or UCS2-LE) file is apparently manageable in C++11, see How do I write a UTF-8 encoded string to a file in Windows, in C++
Since the boost::locale library is now part of C++11, one can just use codecvt_utf16 (see bullet below for eventual code samples)
However, in older compilers (e.g. MSVC 2008), you can use locale and a custom codecvt facet/"recipe", as very nicely exemplified in this answer to Writing UTF16 to file in binary mode
Alternatively, one can also try this method of reading, though it did not work in my case. The output would be missing lines which were replaced by garbage chars.
I wasn't able to get this done in my pre-C++11 compiler and had to resort to scripting it in Ruby and spawning a process (it's just in test so I think that kind of complications are ok there) to execute my task.
Hope this spares others some time, happy to help.
substr works fine for me on Linux with g++ 4.3.3. The program
#include <string>
#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
wstring s1 = L"Hello, world";
wstring s2 = s1.substr(3,5);
wcout << s2 << endl;
}
prints "lo, w" as it should.
However, the file reading probably does something different from what you expect. It converts the files from the locale encoding to wchar_t, which will cause each byte becoming its own wchar_t. I don't think the standard library supports reading UTF-16 into wchar_t.