Greek characters in console programs.

[jgg2002]

Hello everyone. I am Greek, and I want to "cout" letters of the greek alphabet. Is there any way I can pass the 255 limit of value for characters?

A string example is " Τι κάνεις" which means what's up or how are you doing.

[toad]

Assuming your source code is encoded in UTF-8 (there should be a setting in your editor that allows you to change this), all you have to do is make sure that the console's encoding is set to UTF-8 too and its font supports Greek characters. I'm on Linux Mint KDE, and compiling and running the following works as expected, since the conditions I mentioned above hold by default:

#include <iostream>

int main() {
    
    std::cout << "- Τι κάνεις;"   << std::endl;
    std::cout << "- Καλά! Εσύ;"   << std::endl;
    std::cout << "- Καλά κι εγώ!" << std::endl;
}

On Windows, things are a little trickier... Try googling 'windows console UTF-8' and follow what instructions you find. If that doesn't work, try the same for UTF-16. Be careful though; you'll have to either change your source encoding to UTF-16 too, or use e.g. C++11 UTF-16 string literals [1].

BTW, you can use plain std::strings to hold UTF-8/16 strings, but you should be aware that some operations, like getting the length of the string, will break, because of the variable-length nature of the encoding. If you want to perform such operations safely, the simplest way IMO is to first convert your strings to a fixed-length encoding (e.g. UTF-32 - in which case you can store a string as an std::vector<uint32_t>) and perform the operations there. A very convenient and lightweight (header-only) library that can help here is utfcpp [2].

[1] http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/string_literal
[2] https://github.com/nemtrif/utfcpp

[jgg2002]

@toad
Thanks for the help. But, would the program that I make, output the same way in a Windows with the default encoding?

[toad]

would the program that I make, output the same way in a Windows with the default encoding?

Well, yes, since you would make the necessary changes programmatically.

Give this a try:

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <cstdio>
#include <fcntl.h>

#ifndef _O_U16TEXT
#define _O_U16TEXT 0x20000
#endif // _O_U16TEXT

int main() {

	_setmode(STDOUT_FILENO, _O_U16TEXT);
	_setmode( STDIN_FILENO, _O_U16TEXT);

	std::wstring name;

	std::wcout << L"Πώς σε λένε;" << std::endl;

	std::wcin >> name;

	std::wcout << L"Γεια σου, " << name << "!" << std::endl;
}

I tested it with TDM GCC 4.7.1 (the one that comes with Code::Blocks) and it appears to work. Note that you'll probably have to manually change the console font to e.g. Lucida Console, but it should be possible to also do this programmatically ( https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms686200%28v=vs.85%29.aspx ).