How to display Vietnamese characters in C++?

Question

So I'm currently learning C++11 and I'm getting the hang of it. I want to play around with using a different language and since I'm Vietnamese, I want to make a C++ program that uses Vietnamese characters.

So how can I display Vietnamese characters the same way that English is displayed, which is like this:

cout << "Hello. This is English" << endl; //English
cout << "Chào. Đây là tiếng Việt." << endl; //Vietnamese

I heard that C++ has <locale>. Does it help make the Vietnamese characters appear?

Answer 1

You may be running into a problem with your environment. You don't say what platform/environment you are running in, but take the following program:

#include <iostream>
#include <cstdlib>

int main()
{
    std::cout << u8"Chào thế giới!" << std::endl;
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

This yields the following output from iTerm on Mac OS X: Chào thế giới!

With other (non-unicode) environments, using the same code, you may get UTF-8 characters interpreted as ASCII on output. I don't know what the Windows command line will yield, but if you are using an IDE, your IDE may or may not render UTF-8, independently of whether your shell does or doesn't.

Here's a web example.

https://code.sololearn.com/c39N9RN6b4Md/#cpp yields: Chào thế giới!

But http://ideone.com/OkkUZs running exactly the same code yields: Chào thế giới!

It's probably also worth pointing out that in C++ to properly process UTF-8 strings, count "characters", ensure your strings are valid UTF-8, etc. you will likely want to use a Unicode library--working with Unicode is non-trivial.

Personally, I have found both UTFCPP and TinyUTF8 to be excellent libraries - reasonably small, simple and effective.

Hope that helps.

Answer 2

#include <iostream>
#include <io.h>
#include <fcntl.h>

int main() {
    _setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_U16TEXT);
     std::wcout << L"Chào. Đây là tiếng Việt.";
}

This is a solution that works for windows. Unfortunately it's not portable to other platforms.