Unicode on Windows Console

[Michael Ludwig]

There's a WinAPI function that sets stdout to Unicode so you can
read Cyrillic and Greek characters in the cmd.exe console window:

\,,,/
(o o)
------oOOo-(_)-oOOo------
// http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tw4k6df8.aspx - _setmode
// crt_setmodeunicode.c
// This program uses _setmode to change
// stdout to Unicode. Cyrillic and Ideographic
// characters will appear on the console (if
// your console font supports those character sets).

#include <fcntl.h>
#include <io.h>
#include <stdio.h>

int main(void) {
_setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_U16TEXT);
wprintf(L"\x043a\x043e\x0448\x043a\x0430 \x65e5\x672c\x56fd\n");
return 0;
}
-------------------------

Compile it and will print "кошка 日本国", so a Russian name and three
fancy ideograms. (The ideograms aren't supported by my font, but that
is an unrelated problem; and I can't read them anyway; still they look
nice.) My console codepage is just 1252, Western European.

Can I get the same feature in Perl? I left the codepage at 1252 (can be
changes using CHCP) and tried the following:

* binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-16LE)'
* binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-16BE)'
* binmode STDOUT, ':encoding(UTF-8)'

None of these produced the desired effect. Any ideas?

I know I could use a Linux UTF-8 terminal or Cygwin/MinTTY, which is
what I'm using to write this mail, by the way; but the question is
specific to the Windows console in cmd.exe and how to make Perl use
its features.
--
Michael Ludwig

[Michael Ludwig]

Michael Ludwig schrieb am 07.01.2012 um 18:30 (+0100):
> There's a WinAPI function that sets stdout to Unicode so you can
> read Cyrillic and Greek characters in the cmd.exe console window:

> Can I get the same feature in Perl?

Yes: https://metacpan.org/module/Win32::Unicode

Printing twelve hearts:

perl -MWin32::Unicode -lwe "printW qq( \x{2665}) x 12"

♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥ ♥

--
Michael Ludwig

[Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉斯]

Run `chcp 65001`, see <http://enwp.org/chcp_(command)>. I have not
tested this.

Setting the encoding to Windows-1252 and then expecting to be able to
talk variations of UTF to it seems wrong.

[Michael Ludwig]

Lars Dɪᴇᴄᴋᴏᴡ 迪拉斯 schrieb am 12.01.2012 um 09:54 (+0100):
> Run `chcp 65001`, see <http://enwp.org/chcp_(command)>. I have not
> tested this.

Okay, that's just the regular chcp command.

> Setting the encoding to Windows-1252 and then expecting to be able to
> talk variations of UTF to it seems wrong.

Might seem wrong at first glance, I agree; but hey, this is Windows, and
it magically works, sort of bypassing the chcp setting! You just need
the C API call:

_setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_WTEXT)

Or some equivalent of that, which is what Win32::Unicode seems to be
doing.
--
Michael Ludwig