Thread: Foreign Char. in c++

im using ms vs c++ 6.0, is there anyway to type foreign characters (im looking at japanese hiragana) as output...i know how to output it, just dont know how to type the japanese...any hlp is appreciated

sorry i forgot to mention i have windowsxp pro, also i have downloaded the japanese IME from microsoft and i can type japanese in Word. Also if it helps i have ms vs c++.net2003, but i like my 6.0 better *shrug*

well im still a noob at c++ i guess and 2003 just confused the hell out of me when i started :P

anyways whats this about wcout and unicode? i cant write the hiragana out in 2003 either but i can copy and paste them from word...

Notepad supports unicode. To use unicode in C++, google it. wchar_t is the name of the unicode character. Its a C++ keyword. Then you prefix L to your strings and quotes. Just look around the web for tutorials.

Each key on the keyboard is assigned a numeric value and it's the binary representation of that numeric value that is whats really used by the computer, not what character as listed on the keyboard itself. If you use numbers 0 to 255 you can represent all the keys on the standard English keyboard pretty well. However, there aren't enough numbers to represent foreign languages at the same time as English using just that range. That range was selected because it is 2^8 or 8 bits or 1 byte of information. If you used 16 or 32 bits of information to represent a char you could represent a lot more char and include not only standard English but a number of foreign languages as well. STandard char sets have been developed to do just that. ASCII is a standard representation mapping characters to the numeric values of 0 to 255. Unicode is a standard representation mapping characters of several languages to the numeric values of 0 to some higher value, either 2^16 or 2^32 or whatever it is. Likewise, in C++ the char type represents characters taking up one byte of memory and wchar reprsents character types taking up more memory than that, though whether wchar represents char up to 2^16 or 2^32 I can't remember and whether wchar is compatable with unicode characters or not I can't say. My suspicion is that wcout is the version of cout necessary to handle wchar or unicode char, or else it was a typo by the person posting.

I think El-Scotto is asking how to embed Japanese characters in a string literal.

Surprisingly enough, MSVC supports source files that have been saved in unicode. (BE, LE or UTF-8). This means that you can just type whatever character you like into a string literal. Just type it into notepad and select UTF-8 under Encoding in the 'Save As' dialog. I'm not sure how to do this from within the IDE.

Alternatively, you can escape unicode characters with \u followed by the four digit hexadecimal character code.

Code:

#include <windows.h>
#include <wchar.h>

int main(void) {

	DWORD dw;

	// Escaped characters
	const WCHAR * szTest1 = L"\u00E9 \u03C8 \u215E \n";

	// Pasted in characters
	const WCHAR * szTest2 = L"é ψ ⅞ \n";

	getchar();
	WriteConsoleW(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), szTest1, wcslen(szTest1), &dw, NULL);
	WriteConsoleW(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), szTest2, wcslen(szTest2), &dw, NULL);
	getchar();

	return 0;
}

I have used WriteConsoleW as the output function above, you can use whatever wide character output function you like.

You will need to be using 'Lucida Console' as your console font to display these characters.

Well here is what i can do, Hiragana is a kind of phonetic (sp?) set of char. for the japanese language so when i type something in english that sounds the same in japanese it will translate it to the matching japanese hiragana (lets say i type "ki" it will automatically after im done typing it change it to the character for ki). However this only works in Word for me. I can copy and paste it into things usually i get ???? or some random characters that arent correct.