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Printing Japanese Characters in C Program - Stack Overflow

The document is a question on Stack Overflow asking how to print Japanese characters in a C program. The question provides code that converts Unicode values for Japanese characters to decimal and prints them using printf, but only gets question marks as output. Responses suggest using %lc instead of %c to print wide characters, and that setting the locale to the empty string with setlocale(LC_ALL, "") fixes the issue. They also note that the console font may need to support Japanese characters.

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90 views

Printing Japanese Characters in C Program - Stack Overflow

The document is a question on Stack Overflow asking how to print Japanese characters in a C program. The question provides code that converts Unicode values for Japanese characters to decimal and prints them using printf, but only gets question marks as output. Responses suggest using %lc instead of %c to print wide characters, and that setting the locale to the empty string with setlocale(LC_ALL, "") fixes the issue. They also note that the console font may need to support Japanese characters.

Uploaded by

Fabio C
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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2 Printing Japanese characters in C program


c unicode setlocale

I want to print Japanese characters using the C program. I've found the Unicode range of
some Japanese characters, converted them to decimal and used the for loop to print them:

setlocale(LC_ALL, "ja_JP.UTF8");
for (int i = 12784; i <= 12799; i++) {
printf("%c\n",i);
}

locale.h and wchar.h are present in the header.

The output gives me only ?????????? characters.

Please let me know how it could be resolved.

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Карина Баринова asked


●
163 12 May 1 '20 at 9:34

David Ranieri edited


● ●
35.2k 6 44 ● 84 May 1 '20 at 10:10

2 Does your font include Japanese characters? – domsson May 1 '20 at 9:38

Add a comment

2 Answers order by votes

%c is only able to print characters from 0 to 127, for extended characters use:
4

printf("%lc\n", i);

or better yet

wprintf(L"%lc\n", i);

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David Ranieri answered


● ●
35.2k 6 44 ● 84 May 1 '20 at 9:42
Thanks you. I've added %lc. Strange, now printf does not print anything. Do you know what could be wrong? –  Карина
Баринова May 1 '20 at 9:53

Can you try with setlocale(LC_ALL, ""); ? it works for me: ideone.com/AFX4DK , also, as pointed out by
@domsson in comments: check if your console font supports japanese graphs. – David Ranieri May 1 '20 at 9:56

setlocale(LC_ALL, "") has fixed the issue. Thank you very much! The last question. I thought it was needed to specify
what locale I want to use, so I used ja_JP.UTF8. I'm just interested why setlocale(LC_ALL, "") works as well. –  Карина
Баринова May 1 '20 at 10:02

2 It is well explained here: gnu.org/software/libc/manual/html_node/Setting-the-Locale.html – David Ranieri May 1 '20


at 10:04

Add a comment

In addition @David Ranieri fine answer, I wanted to explain about the "output gives me only
2
?????????? characters."

"%c" accepts an int argument. Recall a char passed to a ... function is converted to an
int . Then

the int argument is converted to an unsigned char , and the resulting character is
written. C17dr § 7.21.6.1 8.

Thus printf("%c" ... handles values 0-255. Values outside that range being converted to
that range.

OP's code below re-written in hex.

// for (int i = 12784; i <= 12799; i++) {


for (int i = 0x31F0; i <= 0x31FF; i++) {
printf("%c\n",i);
}

With OP locale setting and implementation, printing values [0xF0 - 0XFF] resulted in '?' . I am
confident that is true for [0x80 - 0xFF] for OP. Other possibilities exist. I received � .

Had OP done the below, more familiar output would be seen, though not the Hiragana
characters desired.

for (int i = 0x3041; i <= 0x307E; i++) {


printf("%c",i);
}

ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ[\]^_`abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz{|}~

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chux - Reinstate Monica answered
●
111k 11 ● 102 ● 207 May 1 '20 at 15:33

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