Jun 02 2011

Display Unicode Characters on the Windows Console

Even in today’s mostly-Unicode world on Windows, the console (i.e. cmd.exe) still defaults to using OEM code pages (i.e. multibyte characters).  To set the console to Unicode mode, use the following code:

#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;
}

This information came from two great articles by Michael Kaplan: