QTextEdit doesn't display special characters not available on keyboard

Question

I have to display some special characters like ¼, ½ etc. in a QTextEdit which are not on the QWERTY keyboard.I am able to type these characters in the QTextEdit and also able to paste them. But when I try to programatically set these characters QTextEdit displays an extra character 'Â'.

I do not get this problem while typing and pasting. These characters are typed with some Alt+[code] codes.

I am using Qt 4.8 on Windows 8 64bit.

#include<QtGui>

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
{
 QApplication a(argc, argv);
QTextEdit t;
    t.setPlainText("¼2½  \n");              // QTextEdit displays=> ¼2½
    //    t.setHtml("¼2½  \n");             // QTextEdit displays=> ¼2½
    //    t.insertHtml("¼2½  \n");          // QTextEdit displays=> ¼2½
    //    t.insertPlainText("¼2½  \n");     // QTextEdit displays=> ¼2½
// also tried setHtml() with HTML code which works in Firefox didn't help me 
    t.show();
    return a.exec();
}

How can I put these characters in a QTextEdit programatically without this extra character?

Answer 1

Use QTextCodec to display characters in UTF-8 encoding.

#include <QTextCodec>
...
QTextCodec* codec=QTextCodec::codecForName("UTF-8");
//    QTextCodec::setCodecForLocale(codec); //if you want everything to be in UTF-8
QTextCodec::setCodecForCStrings(codec);
QApplication a(argc, argv);
...

Or convert characters in place:

t.setPlainText(QObject::trUtf8("¼2½  \n"));

Answer 2

Your source code needs to be written in UTF-8 encoding, and you should use QStringLiteral in Qt 5 or QString::fromUtf8 in Qt 4. You won't have that problem then.

E.g.:

t.setPlainText(QStringLiteral("¼, ½"));    // Qt 5
t.setPlainText(QString::fromUtf8("¼, ½")); // Qt 4

Ensure that the editor you're using is set to encode the file as UTF-8, not Latin 1 etc.