How can I display unicode characters in a linux terminal using C++?

Question

I'm working on a chess game in C++ on a linux environment and I want to display the pieces using unicode characters in a bash terminal. Is there any way to display the symbols using cout?

An example that outputs a knight would be nice: ♞ = U+265E.

Answer 1

Sorry misunderstood your question at first. This code prints a white king in terminal (tested it with KDE Konsole)

#include <iostream>

int main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
std::cout <<"\xe2\x99\x94"<<std::endl;
return 0;
}

Normally encoding is specified through a locale. Try to set environment variables.

In order to tell applications to use UTF-8 encoding, and assuming U.S. English is your preferred language, you could use the following command:

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8

Are you using a "bare" terminal or something running under X-Server?

Answer 2

To output Unicode characters you just use output streams, the same way you would output ASCII characters. You can store the Unicode codepoint as a multi-character string:

 std::string str = "\u265E";
 std::cout << str << std::endl;

It may also be convenient to use wide character output if you want to output a single Unicode character with a codepoint above the ASCII range:

 setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_US.UTF-8");
 wchar_t codepoint = 0x265E;
 std::wcout << codepoint << std::endl;

However, as others have noted, whether this displays correctly is dependent on a lot of factors in the user's environment, such as whether or not the user's terminal supports Unicode display, whether or not the user has the proper fonts installed, etc. This shouldn't be a problem for most out-of-the-box mainstream distros like Ubuntu/Debian with Gnome installed, but don't expect it to work everywhere.