Printing smiley face c++

Question

I'm trying to print out the smiley face (from ascii) based on the amount of times the user asks for it, but on the console output screen, it only shows a square with another one inside of it. Where have I gone wrong?

#include <iostream>
using namespace std;
int main()
{
    int smile;

    cout << "How many smiley faces do you want to see? ";
    cin >> smile;

    for (int i = 0; i < smile; i++)
    {
        cout << static_cast<char>(1) << "\t";
    }
    cout << endl;
    return 0;
}

Answer 1

ASCII does not have smileys (so in ASCII you'll have :-) and you expect your reader to understand that as a smiley). But Unicode has several ones, e.g. ☺ (white smiling face, U+263A); see http://unicodeemoticons.com/ or http://www.unicode.org/emoji/charts/emoji-list.html for a nice table of them.

In 2017, it is reasonable to use UTF8 everywhere (in terminals & outputs). UTF-8 is a very common encoding for Unicode, and many Unicode characters are encoded in several bytes in UTF-8.

So in a terminal using UTF8, with a font with many characters available, since ☺ is UTF8 encoded as "\342\230\272", use:

for (int i = 0; i < smile; i++)
{
    cout << "\342\230\272" << "\t";
}

^{In 2017, most "console" are terminal emulators because real terminals -like the mythical VT100- are today in museums, and you can at least configure these terminal emulators to use UTF-8 encoding. On many operating systems (notably most Linux distributions and MacOSX), they are using UTF-8 by default.}

If your C++11 compiler accepts UTF8 in strings (and a UTF8 source file), as most do today, you could even have "☺" in your source code. To type that you'll often use some copy and paste technique from an outside source. On my Linux system I often use some Character Map utility (e.g. run charmap in a terminal) to get them.

In ASCII, the character of code 1 is a control character, the Start Of Heading. Perhaps you are confusing ASCII with CP437 which is no more used (but in 1980s encoded a smiley-thing at code 1).

You need to use Unicode and understand it. Today, in 2017, you cannot afford using other encodings (they are historical legacy for museums) externally. Of course if you use weird characters, you should document that the user of your program should use some font having them (but most common fonts used in terminal emulators accept a very wide part of Unicode, so that is not a problem in practice). However, on my Linux computers, many fonts are lacking U+1F642 Slightly Smiling Face (e.g. "\360\267\231\202" in a C++ program) which appeared only in Unicode7.0 in 2014.