Printing Unicode characters to the output console

In the previous recipe, Understanding the various character and string types, we looked at the various data types for storing characters and strings of characters. This multitude of types was necessary because there are a multitude of character sets that have been developed over time.

The most widely used character sets are ASCII and Unicode. Although support for the former has been available on all compilers and target platforms since the creation of the language, the support for the latter has evolved at a different pace and in different forms for Windows and Unix/Linux systems. In this recipe, we will look at how to print texts in different encodings to the standard output console.

How to do it…

To write text to the standard output console, you can use the following:

• For writing ASCII characters, use std::cout:

  std::cout << "C++\n";
  

• For writing UTF-8 encoded Unicode...