Question

Possible Duplicate:
How to Output Unicode Strings on the Windows Console

I try to output UTF-16 charachters to console in win32console application, but i cannot change the encoding of output stream, I try to use SetConsoleOutputCP() function but when i use next code for testing

    std::wcout << GetConsoleOutputCP() << std::endl;//output 866
    SetConsoleOutputCP(CP_WINUNICODE);              //if i set CP_UTF8 it works
    std::wcout << GetConsoleOutputCP() << std::endl;//output 866

I get the same result (866) for two cases. When I’m try to set CP_UTF8 it works correct but I need UTF-16, why my attempt is failed and how can I set output stream’s encoding to UTF-16?

Answer 1

You cannot set the encoding to UTF-16 because both, cout and wcout, write to the same byte-oriented stream (STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE) and only byte-oriented encodings are supported. UTF-16 is word oriented. This implies that the only Unicode encoding that can be written to the standard output is UTF-8.