incorrect ASCII values + curses

[Agni]

Hi,

We're using curses library functions to draw windows in our project. For showing an error the error message is enclosed within '-'s , it seems to be working fine till we ported to a new linux machine where its displaying some garbage instead of the '-' . To be honest the code is vast and i dont think there's anything wrong with it, seems like there's some configuration problem with some curses path. the ASCII value of '-' is defined in something like 'ACS_HLINE' macro.

i know there's very little info and not too clear. But this is the best i could get, if anyone has any clue please reply.

[vijayan121]

what is the default output locale on the machine?
are you using something like hline( std::cout.widen( '-' ), n ) ; or whline( window, std::cout.widen( '-' ), n ) ; to draw these lines?

[Agni]

Hi Vijayan,

On some digging up i found that the window is not made up of garbage but rather from the values taken up from curses.h file.

#define ACS_HLINE NCURSES_ACS('q') /* horizontal line */
#define ACS_VLINE NCURSES_ACS('x') /* vertical line */

however we have written a wrapper around this and are setting our own values for these Macros

#define ACS_HLINE TEXT('-')

but these values are either getting over-written or not getting applied at all. Seems like some issue with how the files are included. I think it's a very intrinsic issue related to our code.

Thanks a lot for your time.

[vijayan121]

> however we have written a wrapper around this and are setting our own values for these Macros
> #define ACS_HLINE TEXT('-') have you rebuilt the library (libcurses or libncurses) with these wrappers?
and perhaps the macro should be just #define ACS_HLINE '-'

[Agni]

Yes we did that, and then later in one of the files the includes were not proper. after doing that the code is working fine , atleast for now. We've decided to look into it in detail again in future. What it did though is that my interest in the curses library has grown and i downloaded it on my laptop and have started to use it. Going slightly off-topic can you suggest some cool things that i can try using curses, basically what is the main use of the curses library?

[Duoas]

For all those graphic characters you are completely at the mercy of the terminfo database, which is often enough incomplete in that respect.

I typically just set the graphic characters to a nice combination of minus, pipe, and plus (-, |, +) in my initialization code.