Properly print utf8 characters in windows console

Question

This is the way I try to do it:

#include 
#include 
using namespace std;

int main() {
  SetConsoleOutputCP(CP_UTF8);
   //ge         


        

Answer 1

UTF-8 doesn't work for Windows console. Period. I have tried all combinations with no success. Problems arise due to different ANSI/OEM character assignment so some answers say that there is no problem but such answers may come from programmers using 7-bit plain ASCII or have identical ANSI/OEM code pages (Chinese, Japanese).

Either you stick to use UTF-16 and the wide-char functions (but you are still restricted to the 256 characters of your OEM code page - except for Chinese/Japanese), or you use OEM code page ASCII strings in your source file.

Yes, it is a mess at all.

For multilingual programs I use string resources, and wrote a LoadStringOem() function that auto-translates the UTF-16 resource to OEM string using WideCharToMultiByte() without intermediate buffer. As Windows auto-selects the right language out of the resource, it will hopefully load a string in a language that is convertible to the target OEM code page.

As a consequence, you should not use 8-bit typographic characters for English-US language resource (as ellipsis … and quotes “”) as English-US is selected by Windows when no language match has been detected (i.e. fallback). As an example you have resources in German, Czech, Russian, and English-US, and the user has Chinese, he/she will see English plus garbage instead of your nicely made typographic if you made your text nice-looking.

Now, on Windows 7 and 10, SetConsoleOutputCP(65001/*aka CP_UTF8*/) works as expected. You should keep your source file in UTF-8 without BOM, otherwise, your string literals will be recoded to ANSI by compiler. Moreover, the console font must contain desired characters, and must not be "Terminal". Unluckily, there is no font covering both umlauts and Chinese characters, even when you install both language packs, so you cannot truly display all character shapes at once.