Question

I have a MFC application compiled with the MBCS character set. I have a submenu off of my main menu that I would like to add unicode characters to. Can that be done?

Answer 1

You can force the use of Unicode strings even in MBCS apps by explicitely calling the Unicode form of an API and passing it a Unicode string.

In your case, ModifyMenuW() is the API that sets the menu item text (assuming the menu item already exists):

ModifyMenuW(GetMenu()->m_hMenu,ID_APP_ABOUT, MF_BYCOMMAND , 0, L"\u573F");

This code displays a Chinese ideogram (I have no idea of its meaning) instead of the original text

The L in front of the string says it’s a Unicode string. \u573F is the way you encode a Unicode char in your C++ ASCII source file. The W at the end of the API name: It stands for Wide and denotes the Unicode form of the API.

Note that if your goal is to translate the full UI of your app, this is a complete other story: The method I showed here is only suitable for one-shot calls. You can’t create a full UI that way.

You can translate your MBCS app to Japanese, Russian, whatever,… without switching to Unicode (Although it would be a very good idea to do that switch. But that can be costly for legacy apps).

You have 2 friends to help you out there: appTranslator lets you very easily translate your app (and manage your translations (Disclaimer: This is my own ad 😉 and Microsoft AppLocale helps you test MBCS apps in different codepages without actually changing the codepage of your computer (which requires a reboot).