Is it possible to change charset encoding in C?

Question

I would like to make my C program print signs from other charset, not from the ASCII table as it is default. For example, I want to print chars in range [200,250] from the ISO-8859 charset. Is it possible at all? How the compiler should be set? Thanks in advance for help!

This question is tagged with `8859-2`. Is that the `8859` character set you want? Not `8859-1` also called `latin-1`? — Marlin Pierce, Oct 21 '19 at 17:23
no, I i would like to display char from different charsets, e.g. 8859-2, WINDOWS-1250 etc. — ChillyWilly88, Oct 21 '19 at 21:29

David Ranieri · Answer 1 · 2019-10-21T17:29:12.483

2

Setting you locales and using wide characters:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>
#include <locale.h>

int main(void) 
{
    setlocale(LC_CTYPE, "");

    for (wchar_t c = 200; c < 250; c++)
    {
        wprintf(L"%lc", c);
    }
    wprintf(L"\n");
    return 0;
}

Output:

ÈÉÊËÌÍÎÏÐÑÒÓÔÕÖ×ØÙÚÛÜÝÞßàáâãäåæçèéêëìíîïðñòóôõö÷øù

edited Oct 21 '19 at 17:29

answered Oct 21 '19 at 17:09

David Ranieri

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how about printing WINDOWS-1250 chars? I use debian btw – ChillyWilly88 Oct 21 '19 at 21:30
1

Ah, you are on debian, in this case [iconv](http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/iconv_open.3.html) can help – David Ranieri Oct 21 '19 at 21:46
could u elaborate on that/ – ChillyWilly88 Oct 21 '19 at 22:06
Of course, iconv can convert between different encodings i.e. utf8 to code page 1250 and viceversa.Another option is save your source files (.c) with the desired encoding, c will assume this encoding for your I/O operations – David Ranieri Oct 21 '19 at 22:17
My locales are es_ES.UTF8 – David Ranieri Oct 22 '19 at 05:52

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Oct 21 '19 at 17:05

In fact C functions don't care about encoding, so if you have a code like that:

#include <stdio.h>

int main( void )
{
    printf( "Hällo Wörld\n" );
    return( 0 );
}

It will print out 'germanzied' "Hello World" in exactly the encoding of the C source file, indepedent from system settings etc. The same is true of course if you print strings that you read from a file. If you want to reencode strings (say from UTF-8 to ISO-8859) you have to do t manually or search for an appropriate library

Well, but i don't want to print a fixed string of chars, i want to print chars from the table of a certain charset — ChillyWilly88, Oct 21 '19 at 21:27

Is it possible to change charset encoding in C?

2 Answers2