How does string work with non-ascii symbols while char does not?

c++ string character-encoding char non-ascii-characters
That new guy picture That new guy · Apr 25, 2014 · Viewed 8.5k times · Source

I understand that char in C++ is just an integer type that stores ASCII symbols as numbers ranging from 0 to 127. The Scandinavian letters 'æ', 'ø', and 'å' are not among the 128 symbols in the ASCII table.

So naturally when I try char ch1 = 'ø' I get a compiler error, however string str = "øæå" works fine, even though a string makes use of chars right?

Does string somehow switch over to Unicode?

Answer

M.M picture M.M · Apr 25, 2014

In C++ there is the source character set and the execution character set. The source character set is what you can use in your source code; but this doesn't have to coincide with which characters are available at runtime.

It's implementation-defined what happens if you use characters in your source code that aren't in the source character set. Apparently 'ø' is not in your compiler's source character set, otherwise you wouldn't have gotten an error; this means that your compiler's documentation should include an explanation of what it does for both of these code samples. Probably you will find that str does have some sort of sequence of bytes in it that form a string.

To avoid this you could use character literals instead of embedding characters in your source code, in this case '\xF8'. If you need to use characters that aren't in the execution character set either, you can use wchar_t and wstring.

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