From: David Vallner <david@...>
Date: 2006-11-08T11:23:37+09:00
Subject: Re: Unicode in irb on windows (respectively script/console in instantrails)

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Austin Ziegler wrote:
>=20
> Ack my bad. I had forgotten: you can specify the UTF-8 codepage
> (CP_UTF8) with:
>=20
>  chcp 65001
>=20
> There are some caveats, of course:
>=20
> http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2006/03/06/544251.aspx
>=20

Also the good old combo of "mode con codepage select=3D65001".

http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=3D/library/en-us/intl/u=
nicode_81rn.asp
lists pretty much all the numbers you can use. (The pain of navigating
to that on the MSDN website.)

Amusingly enough, none of those are even present anymore on WinXP Pro
x64. For yet more hilarity, the console is by default set to the DOS OEM
codepage of the given locale, instead of the newer ANSI ones that are
ISO extensions, which causes great fun when trying to use software
that's ever so smart and autodetects my locale as my preferred language
(Postgres, assorted GNU stuff being too clever by half) instead of using
the OS language version.

And "there are some caveats" is an understatement, the UTF-8 support in
the console is a sham - I couldn't get a trivial C program using
arbitrary combinations of tchar.h, wchar.h, -DUNICODE, cmd.exe, the
Windows console, a Cygwin and an MSYS rxvt to do something as daunting
as input random characters that aren't shared between Latin1 and Latin2
codepages, store them as multibyte internally, and then write them out
to a text file and to the console successfully without one step
breaking. The fact whole of CMD broke down in tears from changing that
setting is also worth noting - IIRC, had problems doing output
redirection to a file and whatnot (I can't play around with this without
setting up a virtual machine with a 32bit XP). Basically, the Path Less
Annoying is to only use the console for working in your "native"
codepage, and use a non-console tool for everything else.

end # of rant

David Vallner


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