I develop C++ cross platform using Microsoft Visual Studio on Windows and GCC on uBuntu Linux.
In Visual Studio I can use unicode symbols like "π" and "²" in my code. Visual Studio always saves the source files as UTF-8 with BOM (Byte Order Mark).
For example:
// A = π.r²
double π = 3.14;
GCC happily compiles these files only if I remove the BOM first. If I do not remove the BOM, I get errors like these:
wwga_hydutils.cpp:28:9: error: stray ‘\317’ in program
wwga_hydutils.cpp:28:9: error: stray ‘\200’ in program
Which brings me to the question:
Is there a way to get GCC to compile UTF-8 files without first removing the BOM?
I'm using:
- Windows 7
- Visual Studio 2010
and:
- uBuntu Oneiric 11.10
- GCC 4.6.1 (as provided by apt-get install gcc)
Edit:
As the first commenter pointed out, my problem was not the BOM, but having non-ascii characters outside of string constants. GCC does not like non-ascii characters in symbol names, but it turns out GCC is fully compatible with UTF-8 with BOM.
Best Answer
According to the GCC Wiki, this isn't supported yet. You can use
-fextended-identifiers
and pre-process your code to convert the identifiers to UCN. From the linked page:See also g++ unicode variable name and Unicode Identifiers and Source Code in C++11?