C String Literal "too big for character"

Question

With MSVC 2010 i try to compile this in C or C++ mode (needs to be compilable in both) and it does not work. Why? I thought and found in the documentation that '\x' takes the next two characters as hex characters and not more (4 characters when using \X").

I also learned that there is no portable way to use character codes outside ASCII in C source code anyway, so how can i specify some german ISO-8859-1 characters?

int main() {
     char* x = "\xBCd";  // Why is this not char(188) + 'd'
}

// returns  test.c(2) : error C2022: '3021' : too big for character
// and a warning with GCC

Answer 1

Unfortunately you've stumbled upon the fact that \x will read every last character that appears to be hex^1,2, instead you'll need to break this up:

const char *x = "\xBC" "d"; /* const added to satisfy literal assignment probs */

Consider the output from this program:

/* wide.c */
#include <stdio.h>
int main(int argc, char **argv) 
{
    const char *x = "\x000000000000021";
    return printf("%s\n", x);
}

Compiled and executed:

C:\temp>cl /nologo wide.c
wide.c

C:\temp>wide
!

1. Tested on Microsoft's C++ compiler shipped with VS 2k12, 2k10, 2k8, and 2k5
2. Tested on gcc 4.3.4.