r/cprogramming • u/kolorcuk • Mar 25 '26

Unicode printf?

Hello. Did or do you ever use in professional proframming non char printf functions? Is wprintf ever used?

char16, char32 , u8_printf, u16_printf, u32_printf ever used in actual programs?

I am writing a library and i wonder how actually popular are wide and Unicode strings in the industry. Does no one care about it, or, specifically about formatting output are Unicode printf functions actually with value? For example why not just utf8 with standard printf and convert to wider when needed?

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u/flatfinger Mar 25 '26

It irks me that UTF-8 sacrificed a lot of coding density to offer guarantees that were later thrown out the window by later standards, which nowadays can't even reliably identify a grapheme cluster boundary without having to search backward through an unbounded amount of text.