Special Characters on Console

Question

I've finished my poker game but now I want to make it look a bit better with displaying Spades, Hearts, Diamonds and Clubs. I tried this answer: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2094366/c-printing-ascii-heart-and-diamonds-with-platform-independent

Maybe stupid but I try:

cout << 'U+2662' << endl;

I don't know how to write it.

Answer 1

To output a UTF-8 character, you need to encode it as hex bytes. I'll steal this link to fileinfo.com from an answer to the question you linked - if you jump to the UTF-8 representation, it says 0xE2 0x99 0xA5 and you can convert that to "\xE2\x99\xA5" as a string.

However I can't guarantee that your console will display UTF-8 so this answer might not help.

Answer 2

If you are just trying to use the old ASCII control characters in the Windows console, you can use:

cout << (char) 3 << (char) 4 << (char) 5 << (char) 6 << endl;
//hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades

This isn't Unicode, and I assume it is not very portable. I don't really know of a portable solution to your question.