CODEWITHSUNDEEP
c#
Gigi
Gigi

Reputation: 29461

Draw smiley face ASCII art

This is so trivial it's going to sound silly, but please bear with me.

I used to be able to draw ASCII art smiley faces similar to this post by doing something like:

Console.Write((char)1);

Back when I did this on Windows XP/7, the console was not able to render the character by default. I got around this encoding issue by using this special encoding:

Console.OutputEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding(1252);

Now that I'm trying this out in Windows 10, I am getting this weird question mark character which is reminiscent of the original encoding problem:

enter image description here

Has something changed in the Windows 10 console to cause this problem? How can I fix it?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 2459

Answers (3)

Carrosive
Carrosive

Reputation: 899

Try using the Unicode character

char c = '\u263a';
Console.WriteLine (c.ToString());

Working Example Here

Upvotes: 1

Joey
Joey

Reputation: 354704

Note that (char)1 would only work with the OEM codepage 437. This worked well in DOS applications, but on Windows the approach is slightly trickier, especially since U+0001 does not represent a smiley face. U+263A does. So the correct way is actually:

Console.WriteLine((char)0x263A);

And you may have to explicitly set your output encoding to Unicode, or UTF-8 to make it show up, otherwise the character passes through a few character set translations along the way, depending on your console window settings:

Console.OutputEncoding = Encoding.Unicode;

Upvotes: 2

Matthew Watson
Matthew Watson

Reputation: 109732

This works for me on Windows 10:

public static void Main()
{
    Console.OutputEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.Unicode;
    Console.WriteLine("☺");
}

Upvotes: 1

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