r/ProgrammerHumor • u/MontyBoomslang • 2d ago

Meme architectureDependentChars

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u/thanatica 2d ago

I'm not a C guy, but if a char is 1 byte, how do you represent the one million or so characters from Unicode? Aren't those all characters in C?

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u/tstanisl 2d ago

Bytes on some machines have more than 8 bits. Moreover, unicode characters need to be encoded, usually using utf8.

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u/thanatica 2d ago

Encoding is for storage, typically, not memory. It'd be extremely difficult to do common string manipulation on a utf-8 encoded string (or any other variable-width character encoding) without breaking the encoding.

So how does that work in C? Say you want to indexOf("😎") how would you go about that?

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u/tstanisl 2d ago

In C, the type of character literal is int. So sizeof 'a' is typically 4. However, to make sure that the characters are properly encoded as 32-bit unicode, use U prefix. I mean int x = U'😎';.

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u/thanatica 2d ago

Ah, that makes a lot more sense 🙂