C++ compatibility between Visual Studio and gcc under Linux

Question

I am trying to build a project written in VS 2008 using QtCreator under Linux and I get loads of errors:

/home/ga/dev/CppGroup/MonteCarlo/main.cpp:1: error: stray ‘\377’ in program
/home/ga/dev/CppGroup/MonteCarlo/main.cpp:1: error: stray ‘\376’ in program
/home/ga/dev/CppGroup/MonteCarlo/main.cpp:1: error: stray ‘#’ in program
/home/ga/dev/CppGroup/MonteCarlo/main.cpp:1: warning: null character(s) ignored

etc.

Does it mean that the compiler can't handle unicode correctly? How can I fix it?

Answer 1

That looks like a UTF-16 BOM for little-endian UTF-16. You need to make sure the file is saved as UTF-8 or convert it manually via iconv -f UTF-16LE -t UTF8 myfile.

Answer 2

Ensure the file is encoded in UTF-8. Open it with a text editor that allows you chosing the file encoding (e.g. gedit or notepad++) and convert it. I've had similar issues before, but UTF-8 files work fine (other encodings like UTF-16 won't work).

Edit: Don't convert your resource script (if there's any) to UTF-8. The resource compiler won't be able to read it (at least when using MSVC 2008).