Win32 C++: How to print a smily face ☻ onto console output stream?

Question

I tried setlocale, wchar, usual char... how to define:

char c = '☻'
cout << c << endl;

to print onto console anething (this is relevant to VS2012 and http://ideone.com/LJtDUz)

Answer 1

The problem is that windows by default does not handle Unicode characters and the windows console is not able to display them.

A solution I found at This CPP Thread is as follows:

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

int
main(int argc, char* argv[])
{
    wchar_t* c = L"☻"; /* needed because the project is using 'Unicode Character Set' */

    _setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_WTEXT); /* set stdout to UTF16 */
    std::wcout << c << std::endl; /* use a wide cout call to output characters */

    getchar();

    return 0;
}

When you try and use the ☻ symbol directly in your code, windows will tell you that i needs to convert your files to Unicode, make sure to accept that and use Unicode Character Set as your projects character set type.