Extended ASCII in C++

Question

I've tried to execute the following code:

    #include <iostream>
using namespace std;

int main() {
    unsigned char datoChar = 168;
    cout << datoChar << endl;
    return 0;
}

And it returns a symbol with "?" but it should return "¿"

Answer 1

You have not specified on which platform you are and what the current locale is, but its very likely that if you are running on a Unix-like operating system, the character is being interpreted by the terminal as being UTF-8 and not cp437. CP437, CP1252 and extended ASCII are nowadays mostly obsolete, and are only used in a DOS-like terminals such as Windows's cmd.exe. You may try switching to CP437 in CMD.EXE using the CHCP command.

In UTF-8, all bytes over 0x7f are considered reserved, as they are used to implement multi-character encoding. In UTF-8, '¿' is codepoint U+00BF, and spans over two separate bytes.

You may get specify it into a literal by using the hexadecimal \uXXXX notation, such as in

std::cout << "\u00BF" << std::endl;