I am printing some ASCII art to the Serial monitor from Arduino UNO, with some success. However, using string literals uses more memory than I would like. I wanted to try constructing the strings/chars from other data types so that I can manipulate the data and print the ascii art without storing it in string literals.

However, I have found that there seems to be no way to print UTF-8 characters other than from a string literal. Is this the case? Is there no way to construct a string containing characters that have numeric values that are too big for char?

As an example, to print "▓" works fine as a String literal but, it seams, no other way.

Serial.println("▓");                         // works fine  
Serial.println('▓');                         // char can't store value
Serial.println(String('▓'));                 // char can't store value
Serial.println(0x2593);                      // just prints the numeric value
Serial.println((char)0x2593);                // char can't store value
Serial.println((wchar_t)0x2593);             // doesn't work
Serial.println(String(0x2593));              // doesn't work
Serial.println(String((wchar_t)0x2593));     // doesn't work

Similarily with write() instead of print():

Serial.write("▓");                  // Works fine
Serial.write('▓');                  // char can't store value
Serial.write(0x2593);               // just prints the numeric value
Serial.write((char)0x2593);         // char can't store value
Serial.write((wchar_t)0x2593);      // doesn't work

String((char)65) constructs the string "A" from the numeric value 65. Neither String((char)0x2593) nor String((wchar_t)0x2593) produce the desired results. Is there a way to construct a string from numeric values that are too big to store in 'char'?

I am printing some ASCII art to the Serial monitor from Arduino UNO, with some success. However, using string literals uses more memory than I would like. I wanted to try constructing the strings/chars from other data types so that I can manipulate the data and print the ascii art without storing it in string literals.

However, I have found that there seems to be no way to print UTF-8 characters other than from a string literal. Is this the case? Is there no way to construct a string containing characters that have numeric values that are too big for char?

As an example, to print "▓" works fine as a String literal but, it seams, no other way.

Serial.println("▓");                         // works fine  
Serial.println('▓');                         // char can't store value
Serial.println(String('▓'));                 // char can't store value
Serial.println(0x2593);                      // just prints the numeric value
Serial.println((char)0x2593);                // char can't store value
Serial.println((wchar_t)0x2593);             // doesn't work
Serial.println(String(0x2593));              // doesn't work
Serial.println(String((wchar_t)0x2593));     // doesn't work

Similarily with write() instead of print():

Serial.write("▓");                  // Works fine
Serial.write('▓');                  // char can't store value
Serial.write(0x2593);               // just prints the numeric value
Serial.write((char)0x2593);         // char can't store value
Serial.write((wchar_t)0x2593);      // doesn't work

I also tried deriving new component strings from a string literal using substring() and charAt(). Neither works. Both produce � in the output.

String((char)65) constructs the string "A" from the numeric value 65. Neither String((char)0x2593) nor String((wchar_t)0x2593) produce the desired results. Is there a way to construct a string from numeric values that are too big to store in 'char'?