Unicode problems in C++ but not C

Question

I\'m trying to write unicode strings to the screen in C++ on Windows. I changed my console font to Lucida Console and I set the output to CP_UTF8 a

Answer 1

Although you've set your console to expect UTF-8 output, I suspect that your compiler is treating string literals as being in some other character set. I don't know why the C compiler acts differently.

The good news is that C++11 includes some support for UTF-8, and that Microsoft has implemented the relevant portions of the Standard. The code is a little hairy, but you'll want to look into std::wstring_convert (converts to and from UTF-8) and the header.

You can use those functions to convert to UTF-8, and assuming your console is expecting UTF-8, things should work correctly.

Personally, when I need to debug something like this, I often direct the output to a text file. Text editors seem to handle Unicode better than the Windows console. In my case, I often output the code points correctly, but have the console set up incorrectly so that I still end up printing garbage.

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I can tell you that this worked for me in both Linux (using Clang) and Windows (using GCC 4.7.3 and Clang 3.5; you need to add "std=c++11" to the command line to compile with GCC or Clang):

#include 

int main()
{
    const char text[] = u8"Россия";
    std::printf("%s\n", text);
}

Using Visual C++ (2012, but I believe it would also work with 2010), I had to use:

#include 
#include 
#include 
#include 

int main()
{
    std::wstring_convert> converter;
    auto text = converter.to_bytes(L"Россия");
    std::printf("%s\n", text.c_str());
}