C++ Printing special ascii characters to the Windows console

Question

After 2 hours of searching and trying various methods, I'm pulling my hair out trying to print special ascii characters to the console! (C++)

typedef unsigned char UCHAR;

int main()
{
  UCHAR c = '¥';
  cout << c;

  return 0;
}

Why does this code print Ñ (209) instead of ¥ (165)???

I've tried:

SetConsoleCP(CP_UTF8);
SetConsoleOutputCP(CP_UTF8);

but neither seems to do anything, no matter which values I pass to it.

Someone else suggested that the console's font needed to be changed through the registry. But that's ridiculous. I don't want my end users to have to start changing registry values simply to run my program...

the really odd thing is that if I print all the ascii characters to a file (using ofstream), they show up correctly both in notepad, and the visual studio editor (2012 professional).

ofstream file("ASCII.txt");;
if (file.is_open())
{
    UCHAR c = 0;
    for (int i = 0; i < 256; i++)
    {
        c++;
        file << c << "\t|\t" << (int)c << endl;
    }
}
file.close();

Any help is much appreciated. Thanks!

Answer 1

Welcome to the pain of encoding :(

#include <iostream>
#include <windows>

int main() {
    SetConsoleCP(437);
    SetConsoleOutputCP(437);
    std::cout << (char)157 << "\n";
}

Generates:

The problem is that your source file is not in CP437 and therefore the character has a different value than the one you are trying to print (as you noted, in your source value is is 165 which is a different character in CP437).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_437