Question

In my program I used wstring to print out text I needed but it gave me random ciphers (those due to different encoding scheme). For example, I have this block of code.

wstring text;
text.append(L"Some text");

Then I use directX to render it on screen. I used to use wchar_t but I heard it has portability problem so I switched to swtring. wchar_t worked fine but it seemed only took English character from what I can tell (the print out just totally ignore the non-English character entered), which was fine, until I switch to wstring: I only got random ciphers that looked like Chinese and Korean mixed together. And interestingly, my computer locale for non-unicode text is Chinese. Based on what I saw I suspected that it would render Chinese character correctly, so then I tried and it does display the charactor correctly but with a square in front (which is still kind of incorrect display). I then guessed the encoding might depend on the language locale so I switched the locale to English(US) (I use win8), then I restart and saw my Chinese test character in the source file became some random stuff (my file is not saved in unicode format since all texts are English) then I tried with English character, but no luck, the display seemed exactly the same and have nothing to do with the locale. But I don’t understand why it doesn’t display correctly and looked like asian charactor (even I use English locale).

Is there some conversion should be done or should I save my file in different encoding format? The problem is I wanted to display English charactore correctly which is the default.

Answer 1

Bug solved, it turns out to be the CASTING problem (not rendering problem as previously said).
The bugged text is a intermediate product during some internal conversion process using swtringstream (which I forgot to mention), the code is as follows

wstringstream wss;
wstring text;
textToGenerate.append(L"some text");
wss << timer->getTime()
text.append(wss.str());

Right after this process the debugger shows the text as a bunch of random stuff but later somehow it converts back so it’s readable. But the problem appears at rendering stage using DirectX. I somehow left the casting for wchar_t*, which results in the incorrect rendering.

old:

LPCWSTR lpcwstrText = (LPCWSTR)textToDraw->getText(); 

new:

LPCWSTR lpcwstrText = (*textToDraw->getText()).c_str();

By changing that solves the problem.

So, this is resulted by a bad cast. As some kind people provided correction to my statement.