Print chess unicode characters in C++, and make characters square sized

Question

I'd like to ask what's the simplest way of writing the chess unicode characters in a console window in C++? (♙♘♗♖♕♔♟♞♝♜♛♚) They are part of the "Miscellaneous Symbols" block in unicode. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess_symbols_in_Unicode

I also want to print characters with square size, right now my chess board is not square, because each character is a rectangle and not a square.

It'd also be good to be able to write with ordinary non-square characters below the chess board, but that might be impossible? To mix different fonts/formattings in the same console window?

Ok, thanks in advance! :)

Answer 1

The first part of your question, outputting those characters, is platform-dependent. Linux consoles often use UTF-8, if that is the case you can encode the characters as UTF-8 and write them to standard output. On Windows you can use the Console API (the WriteConsole function):

HANDLE handle = GetStandardHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);
DWORD written = 0;
// explicitly call the wide version (which always accepts UTF-16)
WriteConsoleW(handle, L"\u2658", 1, &written, NULL);

One caveat which is hard to work around is that you need a console font containing those characters.

For getting square cells, this is dependent on a lot of specifics about the way the console renders text. If it uses font substitution, then there is a chance the text will not actually be monospaced.

Now, if you have a console font with these characters, and if that font is monospaced, then you may be able to draw a square board by adding some spacing between the characters. You can use block elements like ▌ U+258C — LEFT HALF BLOCK to draw the chequerboard: ▌♘▐█▌ ▐.