Why don't scripting languages output Unicode to the Windows console?

Question

The Windows console has been Unicode aware for at least a decade and perhaps as far back as Windows NT. However for some reason the major cross-platform scripting languages

Answer 1

For Perl to fully support Windows in this way, every call to print printf say warn and die has to be modified.

• Is this Windows?
• Which version of Windows? ^{_{Perl still mostly works on Windows 95}}
• Is this going to the console, or somewhere else.

Once you have that determined, you then have to use a completely different set of API functions.

If you really want to see everything involved in doing this properly, have a look at the source of Win32::Unicode::Console.

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On Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and similar OS's you can usually just call binmode on the STDOUT and STDERR file handles.

binmode STDOUT, ':utf8';
binmode STDERR, ':utf8';

^{_{This assumes that the terminal is using the UTF-8 encoding.}}