how do I use special characters

[wachtn]

I am working on a blackjack game where I want to show the cards like this: A♣ for the ace of spades. Ive tryed copy/paste and "/U2660". neither worked. How can I do this?

Thank you for the help.

[helios]

I'll assume you're using cmd.exe as terminal.
cmd.exe sucks at Unicode. If they were going to write a console emulator, I don't know why Microsoft didn't pimped it up a bit. I mean, just look at Konsole, for example.

Anyway, you could one of the sub U+0020 characters for this:
Spade: (char)6
Club: (char)5
Heart: (char)3
Diamond: (char)4
I don't like this approach very much, though.

And now, I'm so dissatisfied I'm going to go look for a console emulator with better Unicode support.

[wachtn]

Helios Thank you for your reply. I just figured out what I had wrong. I was using the upper case 'U' and not a lower case 'u'. Now that I have that fixed I see what you mean by "cmd.exe sucks at Unicode". Instead of the pretty spade (haha I showed a club not a spade. oops) , I get 3 odd looking characters.

What is a sub U+0020 character?

Here is the code I am using to test my unicode output.

{
cout << " \u2663 ";
cin.get();
}

[helios]

Interesting...
'\u####' generates a UTF-8 string. I didn't know that.

You see? That's exactly what I mean. If cmd.exe was a decent terminal emulator, you'd had seen the expected result. A club suit symbol.

By "sub U+0020", I mean all ASCII characters in code points lower than space (' ', U+0020).
Try printing those values I posted earlier. std::cout <<(char)6<<std::endl;

[wachtn]

Helios thank you! I copy and pasted your code and it was exactly what I needed thank you.

Would it be to much to ask you to explain what it is im doing here, and direct me to a complete list of these values for later reference

Thanks again, you were a big help.

[helios]

I could, but I won't.
Using special characters to display the arbitrary images that were assigned to them is a bad idea, and I don't want you to get used to them.

[wachtn]

Ok, thank your for your help.

Why is it a bad idea? From what Ive learned here, I can see there may be issues with consoles not supporting a code. Are there other reason why I should not use special characters in my all text programs?

[helios]

Special characters are special because they whave special uses. Using them for something other than that is just asking for trouble.

Or, at least, that's what I think.

[wachtn]

Helios, I dont quite understand your answer. You seem to know your stuff, so I will keep your advice in mind. Until I learn how and when special characters should be used Ill limit my use of them.

I wasnt able to find a list online but I was able to edit your code to make a list of 256 characters. This is for anyone else that might be curious

for (int i=0;i<256;i++)
{
    std::cout << (char)i << " ";
}

[firedraco]

Yeah, the first 16 or so are special characters, they do beeps, newlines, tabs, etc...and the other special characters could theoretically get something assigned to them and screw up your program.