How to make ncurses display UTF-8 chars correctly in C?

Question

I have a program written in C using ncurses. It let user input and display it. It does not display correctly if user input utf8 chars.

I saved the chars user inputed to a file. And I cat this file directly in Shell, it display correctly.

I searched stackoverflow and google, and tried several methods, such as link with ncursesw, display incorrectly.

And I ldd /usr/bin/screen:libncurses.so.5 => /usr/lib64/libncurses.so.5

screen can display what user input correctly.

How to make ncurses display UTF-8 chars correctly ?

What is the general way to display UTF-8 chars in C using ncurses?

Answer 1

You need to have called setlocale(LC_CTYPE, ""); (with a UTF-8 based locale configured) before initializing ncurses. You also need to make sure your ncurses is actually built with wide char support ("ncursesw") but on modern distros this is the default/only build.