Wierd chars...

Hi all! I was making some little application that needed to convert some chars into others, just so a txt file seems unreadable... But I got some reeeallly wierd problem, I can go around it and make things work fine, but I get this strange problem:

I have in my program an "unsigned char" buffer that I use to read on a file an check to see if the char is equal to something and then I do something with it. Somewhere I have that piece of code:

Code:

---

iFile >> buffer;  //Where iFile is an "ifstream" and "buffer" the char...
if (buffer == '¤')
    //do something...
else
    //...

---

So there I believe I'm having a compiler error. I expect my program to "do something" when the read buffer is equal to the unsigned char '¤' value, or 164... But it never works. If I use the debugger and check what is "(buffer == '¤')" while buffer is supposed to be 164 (¤), it tells me its true (one would hope), but then the code-cursor don't get to the "do something" line and instead it goes inside the "else"... I think that's totally wierd, I use MSVC++ 2003, and I don't see why something that is true could be seen as false...

But I found out that if I wrote:

Code:

---

if (buffer == 164)
//instead of
if (buffer == '¤')

---

it would work... Though these are supposed to be equal (¤ == 164)...

Any idea why this would do something like that?

Looks like you editor and the compiler use different character encodings.
Kurt

Well, I believe that I can only type in ASCII codes, because I can't save files that contain other characters from sets like unicode... And the problem is only runtime....

And the most important part is again left out -- what is the declaration of buffer? Is it really just an unsigned char? Or an array?

Yeah, it's not an array...

So is there something that I can do to change the compiler's character set?

Doesn't look like it:
http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/19z1t1wy.aspx

Try using the \xnn escape syntax to get a specific character. Of course, runtime character set issues still play in, but at least it'll do something.

Not the compiler, no. But you can and should change your editor encoding to match your compiler's.

I had a similar problem before. The solution is to move to unicode, if you want to use the Windows representation of the extended ASCII codes.

Hmm... I tried to change the coding to unicode, but I'm stuck because I realized that there are many types of unicodes I can choose from, but I don't know which one I should use.

I have something like UTF-8, 65000, 1200, big-endian,... Am I lost?


Let's say I try to write to the console "←↑→↓" it gets out this way "âââòêâââ& #226;êêô", (approximatively that way...)
but the problem is that I had only 4 characters, and it prints out 12 characters...