Use the letter ñ in C - c

Question

I have to save in a char[] the letter ñ and I'm not being able to do it. I tried doing this:
char example[1];
example[0] = 'ñ';
When compiling I get this:
$ gcc example.c
error: character too large for enclosing
character literal type
example[0] = 'ñ';
Does anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

If you're using High Sierra, you are presumably using a Mac running macOS 10.13.3 (High Sierra), the same as me.
This comes down to code sets and locales — and can get tricky. Mac terminals use UTF-8 by default and ñ is Unicode character U+00F1, which requires two bytes, 0xC3 and 0xB1, to represent it in UTF-8. And the compiler is letting you know that one byte isn't big enough to hold two bytes of data. (In the single-byte code sets such as ISO 8859-1 or 8859-15, ñ has character code 0xF1 — 0xF1 and U+00F1 are similar, and this is not a coincidence; Unicode code points U+0000 to U+00FF are the same as in ISO 8859-1. ISO 8859-15 is a more modern variant of 8859-1, with the Euro symbol € and 7 other variations from 8859-1.)
Another option is to change the character set that your terminal works with; you need to adapt your code to suit the code set that the terminal uses.
You can work around this by using wchar_t:
#include <wchar.h>
void function(void);
void function(void)
{
wchar_t example[1];
example[0] = L'ñ';
putwchar(example[0]);
putwchar(L'\n');
}
#include <locale.h>
int main(void)
{
setlocale(LC_ALL, "");
function();
return 0;
}
This compiles; if you omit the call to setlocale(LC_ALL, "");, it doesn't work as I want (it generates just octal byte \361 (aka 0xF1) and a newline, which generates a ? on the terminal), whereas with setlocale(), it generates two bytes (\303\261 in octal, aka 0xC3 and 0xB1) and you see ñ on the console output.

Answer 2

You can use "extended ascii". This chart shows that 'ñ' can be represented in extended ascii as 164.
example[0] = (char)164;
You can print this character just like any other character
putchar(example[0]);
As noted in the comments above, this will depend on your environment. It might work on your machine but not another one.
The better answer is to use unicode, for example:
wchar_t example = '\u00F1';

Answer 3

This really depends on which character set / locale you will be using. If you want to hardcode this as a latin1 character, this example program does that:
#include <cstdio>
int main() {
char example[2] = {'\xF1'};
printf("%s", example);
return 0;
}
This, however, results in this output on my system that uses UTF-8:
$ ./a.out
�
So if you want to use non-ascii strings, I'd recommend not representing them as char arrays directly. If you really need to use char directly, the UTF-8 sequence for ñ is two chars wide, and can be written as such (again with a terminating '\0' for good measure):
char s[3] = {"\xC3\xB1"};