Windows Unicode C++ Stream Output Failure

Question

I am currently writing an application which requires me to call GetWindowText on arbitrary windows and store that data to a file for later processing. Long story short, I no

Answer 1

I just tested GCC (versions 4.4 thru 4.7) and MSVC 10, which all exhibit this problem.

Equally broken is wprintf, which does as little as the C++ stream API.

I also tested the raw Win32 API to see if nothing else was causing the failure, and this works:

#include 
int main()
{ 
    HANDLE stdout = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);
    DWORD n;
    WriteConsoleW( stdout, L"\u03B2", 1, &n, NULL );
}

Which writes β to the console (if you set cmd's font to something like Lucida Console).

Conclusion: wchar_t output is horribly broken in both large C++ Standard library implementations.