Specification of source charset encoding in MSVC++, like gcc “-finput-charset=CharSet”

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For those who subscribe to the motto “better late than never”, Visual Studio 2015 (version 19 of the compiler) now supports this.

The new /source-charset command line switch allows you to specify the character set encoding used to interpret source files. It takes a single parameter, which can be either the IANA or ISO character set name:

/source-charset:utf-8

or the decimal identifier of a particular code page (preceded by a dot):

/source-charset:.65001

The official documentation is here, and there is also a detailed article describing these new options on the Visual C++ Team Blog.

There is also a complementary /execution-charset switch that works in exactly the same way but controls how narrow character- and string-literals are generated in the executable. Finally, there is a shortcut switch, /utf-8, that sets both /source-charset:utf-8 and /execution-charset:utf-8.

These command-line options are incompatible with the old #pragma setlocale and #pragma execution-character-set directives, and they apply globally to all source files.

For users stuck on older versions of the compiler, the best option is still to save your source files as UTF-8 with a BOM (as other answers have suggested, the IDE can do this when saving). The compiler will automatically detect this and behave appropriately. So, too, will GCC, which also accepts a BOM at the start of source files without choking to death, making this approach functionally portable.

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