isalnum('£') confusion

When I call isalnum() with the pound (£) sign I get an error like this,

Debug Assertion Failed!

Program:...
File: isctype.c
Line: 56

Expression: (unsigned)(c + 1) <= 256

Upon further investigation I discover that int('£') is -93, ah I think isalnum can’t handle negative values?

Then I try char(-93) which gives me a u with a punctuation mark over it.

So to clear things up I try this,

Code:

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

By looking at the output £ should have a value of 156.

I then try the same code but with 0 to -255, this gives me a value of -100 for the pound sign.

Can anybody explain what’s going on because it’s all got me seriously confused.

Something I have just discovered (which is very strange),

cout<<'£';

will produce ú and not £ as you would have thought, what’s going on?

I am using VC++ 2005 on a Windows XP SP2 platform, all OS options are set to UK English and the VC++ IDE is set to use the same language as windows.

AFAIK, The GB pound sign is not an ASCII character. you'll have to use wchar and unicode to get it to output in the Windows console.

this outputs all ASCII and extended-ASCII characters to the console in W2K, and £ isn't there on mine:

Code:

#include <iostream>

int main()
{
    for(unsigned char i(0); i!=16; ++i)
    {
        for(unsigned char j(0); j!=16; ++j)
            std::cout << static_cast<char>(i*16 + j) << " ";
        std::cout << std::endl;
    }
    std::cin.get();
}

Edit : as for actually using isalpha, isalnum, etc with a wide char, I don't think it's possible, there might be a wide char version available in some 3rd party library, but I couldn't turn anything up in google.

From Dinkumware.com:

isalnum
int isalnum(int c);
The function returns nonzero if c is any of:

a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z
A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
or any other locale-specific alphabetic character.

You will notice that it does not include the full ASCII character set... no punctuation, etc.

AFAIK, The GB pound sign is not an ASCII character

Correct. The regular ASCII chart only goes from 0 - 127. 128 - 255 may be extended ASCII, but it is not fully standardized.

I can get the pound sign to output in the windows console its 156 in the extended ASCII character set (at least the one I'm using, I have been reading that there are more versions).

The problem is that if I type the pound sign in MS VS it actually outputs 163 which is ú.

Having looked around I have encountered a fair few lists of extended ASCII all of which put the value of the pound sign at 156.

Coincidently, the character map in windows gives the hex value of the pound sign as 0x9c (156) and the Keystroke as Alt+0163. That’s for both the DOS: US and DOS: Western Europe character sets.

For the Windows Western char set character map has hex 0xa3 (163)

OK in the writing of this reply I may have stumbled upon something. I would still appreciate ideas however.

PS Thanks for the reply Bench82.

Your assertion failed because (unsigned)(-93 + 1) <= 256 is false.

You can use L"unicode" to quote a unicode string, I think.

At the risk of restarting old arguments, I think the ctype functions need to be cast:

Code:

isalnum( (unsigned char) é);

Yep, I can just use an unsigned char and it works fine as -93 is then 163.

I would still like to sought out this thing where cout<<'£'; produces ú on the command line though.

I think windows is using Windows: Western character set and the console/cmd.exe is using DOS: US/Western Europe but can’t see how to fix the problem simply i.e. without unicode (which I know nothing about) etc.

Yes, the console uses the OEM codepage which is codepage 437 on US systems. You can fix this by calling:

Code:

SetConsoleCP(1252);