How to make ncurses display UTF-8 chars correctly in C?

Question

I have a program written in C using ncurses. It let user input and display it. It does not display correctly if user input utf8 chars.

I saved the chars user inputed

Answer 1

#need these as well on top of installation and locate setting
#at least check locale
locale

locale-gen en_US.UTF-8
#vim ~/.bashrc # add 3 lines once ok and fix the profile
export LANG=en_US.UTF-8
export LANGUAGE=en_US.UTF-8
export NCURSES_NO_UTF8_ACS=1

Answer 2

You need to have called setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""); (with a UTF-8 based locale configured) before initializing ncurses. You also need to make sure your ncurses is actually built with wide char support ("ncursesw") but on modern distros this is the default/only build.