Print braille characters in ncurses

Question

I attempted to print braille characters in ncurses.

This is my code:

#include <ncurses.h>

char *str = 
    " ⠁⠂⠃⠄⠅⠆⠇⠈⠉⠊⠋⠌⠍⠎⠏\n"
    "⠐⠑⠒⠓⠔⠕⠖⠗⠘⠙⠚⠛⠜⠝⠞⠟\n"
    "⠠⠡⠢⠣⠤⠥⠦⠧⠨⠩⠪⠫⠬⠭⠮⠯\n"
    "⠰⠱⠲⠳⠴⠵⠶⠷⠸⠹⠺⠻⠼⠽⠾⠿\n";


int main(int argc, const char *argv[]) {
    initscr();
    printw("%s", str);
    getch();
    printf("%s", curses_version());
    endwin();
    printf("%s", str);
    return 0;
}

The output is:

 ?~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?~[?~\?~]?~^?~_
⠠⠡⠢⠣⠤⠥⠦⠧⠨⠩⠪⠫⠬⠭⠮⠯
⠰⠱⠲⠳⠴⠵⠶⠷⠸⠹⠺⠻⠼⠽⠾⠿

How do I output all characters correctly?

Update: I also tried printf which seems to work, addstr produces the same output as printw.

If I change the locale with setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); I get the output:

  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 [ \ ] ^ _
⠠⠡⠢⠣⠤⠥⠦⠧⠨⠩⠪⠫⠬⠭⠮⠯
⠰⠱⠲⠳⠴⠵⠶⠷⠸⠹⠺⠻⠼⠽⠾⠿

so, does it work with `stdio`? Looks like some encoding problem, but could be a bug in your ncurses' handling of multi-byte characters. — , Aug 16 '17 at 10:23
It seems to work with `stdio`, I am running version 6.0.20160910 of ncurses — Klas. S, Aug 16 '17 at 10:30
Maybe this would help: https://stackoverflow.com/a/6249265/8051589? — Andre Kampling, Aug 16 '17 at 11:14
Yes!! Thank you, I called `setlocale()` after `initscr()`, so it didn't work. If I call if before, it works! — Klas. S, Aug 16 '17 at 11:16
Possible duplicate of [How can I print (☞ﾟヮﾟ)☞ with Ncurses?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/19373027/how-can-i-print-%ef%be%9f%e3%83%ae%ef%be%9f-with-ncurses) — Thomas Dickey, Aug 17 '17 at 08:35

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Aug 16 '17 at 11:16

With some experimentation, I found what is probably wrong:

Your program uses the C locale by default. This assumes ASCII encoding. It's not a problem when you output multi-byte characters with stdio, because these functions just deliver the bytes as is to the console. But ncurses actually uses the locale, so it can know things like how many bytes make a character (important for exact positioning) etc. Change your program as following:
```
#include <curses.h>
#include <locale.h>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
    // initialize locale to system's default:
    setlocale(LC_ALL, "");

    // now init and use curses ...
```
If you still get garbled output, your system's libncurses doesn't handle unicode. In that case, link ncursesw instead of ncurses and you should be done.

Print braille characters in ncurses

1 Answers1