Thread: probably a really simple question, how to insert £?

Not as simple as it seems. In a particularly impressive move of conflict between backwards compatibility and sane behaviour, the compatibility won, and so you end up with your compiler's editor using the Windows-1251 (most likely) character set while the console uses the IBM-DOS character set, codepage 443 or 850 or something like that. (443 is US, 850 is Germany, don't know what UK would be.)
In effect, your compiler compiles the code, which is Win-1251, and takes the character codes of the string literally into the executable. There, in your exe, is a character code that would be the pound sign in Win-1251.
However, when printing to the console, the same character code is interpreted as an 'ú' instead.

Solution? Uh... I'll leave that to others. I think there's a setting somewhere in the console properties for that, but that's only a local solution.

gcn_zelda: there's no character 156 in ASCII...

if its any help I'm using microsofts visual c++ on windows xp pro using the british character set

We guessed as much.

Is there no way just insert a specific character like you can in HTML?

Not really, no. Not a named character. It is possible to insert a specific character code, but that brings you back to the dependency.

c++
cout << (char)156;

c
printf("%c",156);

Dependency on the character set that happens to be in use.

I'm not really bothered if it doesn't work on this system, what matters is if it works when compiled on a linux shell.

In that case, find a text editor that saves the files in the ISO-8895-1 encoding (I believe that's Linux's standard set), save them with that, transfer over the the Linux box and it should work.

Point in case is that if you're developing at one machine but want to run on another, you'll have to keep this stuff in mind - and unfortunately, I'm not aware of any proper way to find out about these problems at runtime. Hey, even Java doesn't manage it!

Characters are problematic anyway. Case in point? Try running this program, compiled as C++ in MSVC++:

Code:

#include <cctype>
#include <iostream>

int main()
{
  using namespace std;
  cout << isprint('ö') << endl;
}

So, what do you think? Is the German umlaut ö a printable character? The answer: the program crashes...

I don't know what the standard says, but MS's documentation on their implementation says this:

The is routines produce meaningful results for any integer argument from –1 (EOF) to UCHAR_MAX (0xFF), inclusive. The expected argument type is int.

Caution For the is routines, passing an argument of type char may yield unpredictable results. An SBCS or MBCS single-byte character of type char with a value greater than 0x7F is negative. If a char is passed, the compiler may convert the value to a signed int or a signed long. This value may be sign-extended by the compiler, with unexpected results.

The confusing part about this is that not every single-character character constant is within that allowed range, because some of them are negative integer values. Yes, it is clearly warned about, but hey, this means that I can't even write a text in my native language without resorting to tricks!