How to Output Unicode Strings on the Windows Console

by

The general strategy I/we use in most (cross platform) applications/projects is: We just use UTF-8 (I mean the real standard) everywhere. We use std::string as the container and we just interpret everything as UTF8. And we also handle all file IO this way, i.e. we expect UTF8 and save UTF8. In the case when we get a string from somewhere and we know that it is not UTF8, we will convert it to UTF8.

The most common case where we stumble upon WinUTF16 is for filenames. So for every filename handling, we will always convert the UTF8 string to WinUTF16. And also the other way if we search through a directory for files.

The console isn’t really used in our Windows build (in the Windows build, all console output is wrapped into a file). As we have UTF8 everywhere, also our console output is UTF8 which is fine for most modern systems. And also the Windows console log file has its content in UTF8 and most text-editors on Windows can read that without problems.

If we would use the WinConsole more and if we would care a lot that all special chars are displayed correctly, we maybe would write some automatic pipe handler which we install in between fileno=0 and the real stdout which will use WriteConsoleW as you have suggested (if there is really no easier way).

If you wonder about how to realize such automatic pipe handler: We have implemented such thing already for all POSIX-like systems. The code probably doesn’t work on Windows as it is but I think it should be possible to port it. Our current pipe handler is similar to what tee does. I.e. if you do a cout << "Hello" << endl, it will both be printed on stdout and in some log-file. Look at the code if you are interested how this is done.

More Related Contents:

  1. How to make Unicode charset in cmd.exe by default?
  2. Unicode console I/O in Haskell on Windows
  3. What encoding are filenames in NTFS stored as?
  4. Hide console of Windows Application
  5. Is there a better Windows Console Window? [closed]
  6. How to display japanese Kanji inside a cmd window under windows?
  7. Difference between MBCS and UTF-8 on Windows
  8. python3 print unicode to windows xp console encode cp437
  9. Decode PowerShell output possibly containing non-ASCII Unicode characters into a Python string
  10. Can I send some text to the STDIN of an active process under Windows?
  11. UTF-16 on cmd.exe
  12. Unicode (utf-8) with git-bash
  13. UTF-8 in Windows 7 CMD [duplicate]
  14. Node.Js on windows – How to clear console
  15. Why does my Qt 4.5 app open a console window under Windows?
  16. Start/Stop and Restart Jenkins service on Windows
  17. How can I cin and cout some unicode text?
  18. Where is “START” searching for executables?
  19. Dependency Walker: missing dlls
  20. WiX (Windows Installer Xml), Create universal variables
  21. How do I deal with quote characters when using cmd.exe
  22. How to force consistent line endings in Git commits with cross-platform compatibility
  23. Register Windows program with the mailto protocol programmatically
  24. Delete files or folder recursively on Windows CMD
  25. Delete all files and folders in a directory
  26. Access a localhost running in Windows from inside WSL2? [closed]
  27. Find absolute java.exe path programmatically from java code
  28. win32 GUI app that writes usage text to stdout when invoked as “app.exe –help”
  29. How to prevent that java.exe is installed in Windows’ system32?
  30. Out of a git console: how do I execute a batch file and then return to git console?

Leave a Comment