C++: Printing ASCII Heart and Diamonds With Platform Independent

Question

I\'m developing a card playing game and would like to print out the symbol for hearts, diamonds, spades and clubs. My target platform will be Linux.

In Windows, I k

Answer 1

On Linux, you can almost always write UTF-8 to stdout and Unicode characters will be displayed beautifully.

#include 

const char heart[] = "\xe2\x99\xa5";

int main() {
    std::cout << heart << '\n';
    return 0;
}

You can find UTF-8 encodings of Unicode characters on sites like fileformat.info (search that page for "UTF-8 (hex)").

Another way is to use wide characters. You first need to call setlocale to set things up. Then just use wchar_t instead of char and wcout instead of cout.

#include 
#include 

const wchar_t heart[] = L"\u2665";

int main() {
    setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
    std::wcout << heart << L'\n';
    return 0;
}