How to print out ≠ to terminal using g++? - c++

I want to print ≠ in the terminal. I tried
cout << '\u2248' << endl;
cout << '\U00002248' << endl;
cout << '≠' << endl;
which gives
14846344
14846344
14846368
I tried replacing the single quotes with double
Ôëê
Ôëê
Ôëá
How can it be done? I'm curious what the explanation for the output I'm getting is? I'm running Netbeans 9 but have tested directly from command line with g++ too. I think this should be possible because echo ≠ produces the correct output in the Windows command prompt.

So, in C++, like in plain C, by default we can work just with ASCII characters.
Char variables contains just 8 bits(1 byte) to store values so maximum - 2^8=256 different symbols can be coded by one char variable.
Single quotes (like 'a') are storing char variables so inside of them can be placed just ASCII-character. Your character is not a part of ASCII table and we need to change the encoding.
For just print(not store/process) your character, you should use another encoding such as UTF-8. You can do it programmatically:
std::setlocale(LC_ALL, /*some system-specific locale name, probably */ "en_US.UTF-8");
std::cout << "\u2260" << std::endl;
Or via command line options to g++ (such as -finput-charset=UTF-16).
As you can see, I'm using double quotes to print non-ASCII symbols to console.

Related

Printing unicode Characters in C++

im trying to print a interface using these characters:
"╣║╗╝╚╔╩╦╠═╬"
but, when i try to print it, returns something like this:
"ôöæËÈ"
interface.txt
unsigned char* tabuleiroImportado() {
std::ifstream TABULEIRO;
TABULEIRO.open("tabuleiro.txt");
unsigned char tabu[36][256];
for (unsigned char i = 0; i < 36; i++) {
TABULEIRO >> tabu[i];
std::cout << tabu[i] << std::endl;
}
return *tabu;
}
i'm using this function to import the interface.
Just like every other possible kind of data that lives in your computer, it must be represented by a sequence of bytes. Each byte can have just 256 possible values.
All the carbon-based life forms, that live on the third planet from the sun, use all sorts of different alphabets with all sorts of characters, whose total number is much, more than 256.
A single byte by itself cannot, therefore, express all characters. The most simple way of handling all possible permutations of characters is to pick just 256 (or less) of them at a time, and assign the possible (up to 256) to a small set of characters, and call it your "character set".
Such is, apparently, your "tabuleiro.txt" file: its contents must be using some particular character set which includes the characters you expect to see there.
Your screen display, however, uses a different character set, hence the same values show different characters.
However, it's probably more complicated than that: modern operating system and modern terminals employ multi-byte character sequence, where a single character can be represented by specific sequences of more than just one byte. It's fairly likely that your terminal screen is based on multi-byte Unicode encoding.
In summary: you need to figure out two things:
Which character set your file uses
Which character set your terminal display uses
Then write the code to properly translate one to the other
It goes without saying that noone else could possibly tell you which character set your file uses, and which character set your terminal display uses. That's something you'll need to figure out. And without knowing both, you can't do step 3.
To print the Unicode characters, you can put the Unicode value with the prefix \u.
If the console does not support Unicode, then you cannot get the correct result.
Example:
#include <iostream>
int main() {
std::cout << "Character: \u2563" << std::endl;
std::cout << "Character: \u2551" << std::endl;
std::cout << "Character: \u2560" << std::endl;
}
Output:
Character: ╣
Character: ║
Character: ╠
the answer is use the unsigned char in = manner like char than a = unicode num
so this how to do it i did get an word like that when i was making an game engine for cmd so please up vote because it works in c++17 gnu gcc and in 2021 too to 2022 use anything in the place of a named a

Cout unsigned char

I'm using Visual Studio 2019: why does this command do nothing?
std::cout << unsigned char(133);
It literally gets skipped by my compiler (I verified it using step-by-step debug):
I expected a print of à.
Every output before the next command is ignored, but not the previous ones. (std::cout << "12" << unsigned char(133) << "34"; prints "12")
I've also tried to change it to these:
std::cout << unsigned char(133) << std::flush;
std::cout << (unsigned char)(133);
std::cout << char(-123);
but the result is the same.
I remember that it worked before, and some of my programs that use this command have misteriously stopped working... In a blank new project same result!
I thought that it my new custom keyboard layout could be the cause, but disabling it does not change so much.
On other online compilers it works properly, so may it be a bug of Visual Studio 2019?
The "sane" answer is: don't rely on extended-ASCII characters. Unicode is widespread enough to make this the preferred approach:
#include <iostream>
int main() {
std::cout << u8"\u00e0\n";
}
This will explicitly print the character à you requested; in fact, that's also how your browser understands it, which you can easily verify by putting into e.g. some unicode character search, which will result in LATIN SMALL LETTER A WITH GRAVE, with the code U+00E0 which you can spot in the code above.
In your example, there's no difference between using a signed or unsigned char; the byte value 133 gets written to the terminal, but the way it interprets it might differ from machine to machine, basing on how it's actually set up to interpret it. In fact, in a UTF-8 console, this is simply a wrong unicode sequence (u"\0x85" isn't a valid character) - if your OS was switched to UTF-8, that might be why you're seeing no output.
You can try to use static_cast
std::cout << static_cast<unsigned char>(133) << std::endl;
Or
std::cout << static_cast<char>(133) << std::endl;
Since in mine all of this is working, it's hard to pinpoint the problem, the common sense would point to some configuration issue.

How to apply <cctype> functions on text files with different encoding in c++

I would like to Split some files (around 1000) into words and remove numbers and punctuation. I will then process these tokenized words accordingly... However, the files are mostly in German language and are encoded in different types:
ISO-8859-1
ISO Latin-1
ASCII
UTF-8
The problem that I am facing is that I cannot find a correct way to apply Character Conversion functions such as tolower() and I also get some weird icons in the terminal when I use std::cout at Ubuntu linux.
For example, in non UTF-8 files, the word französische is shown as franz�sische, für as
f�r etc... Also, words like Örebro or Österreich are ignored by tolower(). From what I know the "Unicode replacement character" � (U+FFFD) is inserted for any character that the program cannot decode correctly when trying to handle Unicode.
When I open UTF-8 files i dont get any weird characters but i still cannot convert upper case special characters such as Ö to lower case... I used std::setlocale(LC_ALL, "de_DE.iso88591"); and some other options that I have found on stackoverflow but I still dont get the desired output.
My guess on how I should solve this is:
Check encoding of file that is about to be opened
open file according to its specific encoding
Convert file input to UTF-8
Process file and apply tolower() etc
Is the above algorithm feasible or the complexity will skyrocket?
What is the correct approach for this problem? How can I open the files with some sort of encoding options?
1. Should my OS have the corresponding locale enabled as global variable to process (without bothering how console displays it) text? (in linux for example I do not have de_DE enabled when i use -locale -a)
2. Is this problem only visible due to terminal default encoding? Do I need to take any further steps before i process the extracted string normally in c++?
My linux locale:
LANG=en_US.UTF-8
LANGUAGE=en_US
LC_CTYPE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_NUMERIC=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_TIME=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_COLLATE="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_MONETARY=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_MESSAGES="en_US.UTF-8"
LC_PAPER=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_NAME=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_ADDRESS=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_TELEPHONE=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_MEASUREMENT=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_IDENTIFICATION=el_GR.UTF-8
LC_ALL=
C
C.UTF-8
el_GR.utf8
en_AG
en_AG.utf8
en_AU.utf8
en_BW.utf8
en_CA.utf8
en_DK.utf8
en_GB.utf8
en_HK.utf8
en_IE.utf8
en_IN
en_IN.utf8
en_NG
en_NG.utf8
en_NZ.utf8
en_PH.utf8
en_SG.utf8
en_US.utf8
en_ZA.utf8
en_ZM
en_ZM.utf8
en_ZW.utf8
POSIX
Here is some sample code that I wrote that doesnt work as I want atm.
void processFiles() {
std::string filename = "17454-8.txt";
std::ifstream inFile;
inFile.open(filename);
if (!inFile) {
std::cerr << "Failed to open file" << std::endl;
exit(1);
}
//calculate file size
std::string s = "";
s.reserve(filesize(filename) + std::ifstream::pos_type(1));
std::string line;
while( (inFile.good()) && std::getline(inFile, line) ) {
s.append(line + "\n");
}
inFile.close();
std::cout << s << std::endl;
//remove punctuation, numbers, tolower,
//TODO encoding detection and specific transformation (cannot catch Ö, Ä etc) will add too much complexity...
std::setlocale(LC_ALL, "de_DE.iso88591");
for (unsigned int i = 0; i < s.length(); ++i) {
if (std::ispunct(s[i]) || std::isdigit(s[i]))
s[i] = ' ';
if (std::isupper(s[i]))
s[i]=std::tolower(s[i]);
}
//std::cout << s << std::endl;
//tokenize string
std::istringstream iss(s);
tokens.clear();
tokens = {std::istream_iterator<std::string>{iss}, std::istream_iterator<std::string>{}};
for (auto & i : tokens)
std::cout << i << std::endl;
//PROCESS TOKENS
return;
}
Unicode defines "code points" for characters. A code point is a 32 bit value. There are some types of encodings. ASCII only uses 7 bits, which gives 128 different chars. The 8th bit was used by Microsoft to define another 128 chars, depending on the locale, and called "code pages". Nowadays MS uses UTF-16 2 bytes encoding. Because this is not enough for the whole Unicode set, UTF-16 is also locale dependant, with names that match Unicode's names "Latin-1", or "ISO-8859-1" etc.
Most used in Linux (typically for files) is UTF-8, which uses a variable number of bytes for each character. The first 128 chars are exactly the same as ASCII chars, with just one byte per character. To represent a character UTF8 can use up to 4 bytes. More onfo in the Wikipedia.
While MS uses UTF-16 for both files and RAM, Linux likely uses UFT-32 for RAM.
In order to read a file you need to know its encoding. Trying to detect it is a real nightmare which may not succeed. The use of std::basic_ios::imbue allows you to set the desired locale for your stream, like in this SO answer
tolower and such functions can work with a locale, e.g.
#include <iostream>
#include <locale>
int main() {
wchar_t s = L'\u00D6'; //latin capital 'o' with diaeresis, decimal 214
wchar_t sL = std::tolower(s, std::locale("en_US.UTF-8")); //hex= 00F6, dec= 246
std::cout << "s = " << s << std::endl;
std::cout << "sL= " << sL << std::endl;
return 0;
}
outputs:
s = 214
sL= 246
In this other SO answer you can find good solutions, as the use of iconv Linux or iconv W32 library.
In Linux the terminal can be set to use a locale with the help of LC_ALL, LANG and LANGUAGE, e.g.:
//Deutsch
LC_ALL="de_DE.UTF-8"
LANG="de_DE.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="de_DE:de:en_US:en"
//English
LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
LANG="en_US.UTF-8"
LANGUAGE="en_US:en"

Space vs null character

In C++, when we need to print a single space, we may do the following:
cout << ' ';
Or we can even use a converted ASCII code for space:
cout << static_cast<char>(32); //ASCII code 32 maps to a single space
I realized that, printing a null character will also cause a single space to be printed.
cout << static_cast<char>(0); //ASCII code 0 maps to a null character
So my question is: Is it universal to all C++ compilers that when I print static_cast<char>(0), it will always appear as a single space in the display?
If it is universal, does it applies to text files when I use file output stream?
No, it will be a zero(0) character in every compiler. Seems that the font you use renders zero characters as a space. For example, in the old times, DOS had a different image (an almost filled rectangle) for zero characters.
Anyway, you really should not output zero characters instead of spaces!
As for the text file part: open the outputted file using a hex editor to see the actual bits written. You will see the difference there!
On my computer, this code
#include <iostream>
int main() {
std::cout << "Hello" << static_cast<char>(0) << "world\n";
}
outputs this:
Helloworld
So no, it clearly doesn’t work.

C++ - string.compare issues when output to text file is different to console output?

I'm trying to find out if two strings I have are the same, for the purpose of unit testing. The first is a predefined string, hard-coded into the program. The second is a read in from a text file with an ifstream using std::getline(), and then taken as a substring. Both values are stored as C++ strings.
When I output both of the strings to the console using cout for testing, they both appear to be identical:
ThisIsATestStringOutputtedToAFile
ThisIsATestStringOutputtedToAFile
However, the string.compare returns stating they are not equal. When outputting to a text file, the two strings appear as follows:
ThisIsATestStringOutputtedToAFile
T^#h^#i^#s^#I^#s^#A^#T^#e^#s^#t^#S^#t^#r^#i^#n^#g^#O^#u^#t^#p^#u^#t^#
t^#e^#d^#T^#o^#A^#F^#i^#l^#e
I'm guessing this is some kind of encoding problem, and if I was in my native language (good old C#), I wouldn't have too many problems. As it is I'm with C/C++ and Vi, and frankly don't really know where to go from here! I've tried looking at maybe converting to/from ansi/unicode, and also removing the odd characters, but I'm not even sure if they really exist or not..
Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
EDIT
Apologies, this is my first time posting here. The code below is how I'm going through the process:
ifstream myInput;
ofstream myOutput;
myInput.open(fileLocation.c_str());
myOutput.open("test.txt");
TEST_ASSERT(myInput.is_open() == 1);
string compare1 = "ThisIsATestStringOutputtedToAFile";
string fileBuffer;
std::getline(myInput, fileBuffer);
string compare2 = fileBuffer.substr(400,100);
cout << compare1 + "\n";
cout << compare2 + "\n";
myOutput << compare1 + "\n";
myOutput << compare2 + "\n";
cin.get();
myInput.close();
myOutput.close();
TEST_ASSERT(compare1.compare(compare2) == 0);
How did you create the content of myInput? I would guess that this file is created in two-byte encoding. You can use hex-dump to verify this theory, or use a different editor to create this file.
The simpliest way would be to launch cmd.exe and type
echo "ThisIsATestStringOutputtedToAFile" > test.txt
UPDATE:
If you cannot change the encoding of the myInput file, you can try to use wide-chars in your program. I.e. use wstring instead of string, wifstream instead of ifstream, wofstream, wcout, etc.
The following works for me and writes the text pasted below into the file. Note the '\0' character embedded into the string.
#include <iostream>
#include <fstream>
#include <sstream>
int main()
{
std::istringstream myInput("0123456789ThisIsATestStringOutputtedToAFile\x0 12ou 9 21 3r8f8 reohb jfbhv jshdbv coerbgf vibdfjchbv jdfhbv jdfhbvg jhbdfejh vbfjdsb vjdfvb jfvfdhjs jfhbsd jkefhsv gjhvbdfsjh jdsfhb vjhdfbs vjhdsfg kbhjsadlj bckslASB VBAK VKLFB VLHBFDSL VHBDFSLHVGFDJSHBVG LFS1BDV LH1BJDFLV HBDSH VBLDFSHB VGLDFKHB KAPBLKFBSV LFHBV YBlkjb dflkvb sfvbsljbv sldb fvlfs1hbd vljkh1ykcvb skdfbv nkldsbf vsgdb lkjhbsgd lkdcfb vlkbsdc xlkvbxkclbklxcbv");
std::ofstream myOutput("test.txt");
//std::ostringstream myOutput;
std::string str1 = "ThisIsATestStringOutputtedToAFile";
std::string fileBuffer;
std::getline(myInput, fileBuffer);
std::string str2 = fileBuffer.substr(10,100);
std::cout << str1 + "\n";
std::cout << str2 + "\n";
myOutput << str1 + "\n";
myOutput << str2 + "\n";
std::cout << str1.compare(str2) << '\n';
//std::cout << myOutput.str() << '\n';
return 0;
}
Output:
ThisIsATestStringOutputtedToAFile
ThisIsATestStringOutputtedToAFile
It turns out that the problem was that the file encoding of myInput was UTF-16, whereas the comparison string was UTF-8. The way to convert them with the OS limitations I had for this project (Linux, C/C++ code), was to use the iconv() functions. To keep the compatibility of the C++ strings I'd been using, I ended up saving the string to a new text file, then running iconv through the system() command.
system("iconv -f UTF-16 -t UTF-8 subStr.txt -o convertedSubStr.txt");
Reading the outputted string back in then gave me the string in the format I needed for the comparison to work properly.
NOTE
I'm aware that this is not the most efficient way to do this. I've I'd had the luxury of a Windows environment and the windows.h libraries, things would have been a lot easier. In this case though, the code was in some rarely used unit tests, and as such didn't need to be highly optimized, hence the creation, destruction and I/O operations of some text files wasn't an issue.