On 9 August 2011 11:45, Soares Chen Ruo Fei <crf@hypershell.org> wrote:
Currently Boost.Ustr provides limited support towards I/O. Due to portability issues I think it is very hard for Boost.Ustr alone to solve problems such as printing Unicode strings to the screen. In fact, I have no idea on how to print even raw Unicode strings onto the Windows terminal. (Any Windows expert knows how to solve this?)
I'm not a Windows expert, but I needed to do this for quickbook, I wasn't able to find a complete solution, but what I've got sort of works. Maybe someone else knows better. I've a horrible feeling that someone is going to point out a much simpler solution that makes what I do look silly and pointless. Quickbook always uses a wide stream for output on windows. When running from an IDE this worked fine, but at the command line it would be converted to the current code page - losing characters that the code page doesn't support. So when running from the console you need to tell windows to use UTF-16: #include <io.h> #include <fcntl.h> int main() { if (_isatty(_fileno(stdout))) _setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_U16TEXT); if (_isatty(_fileno(stderr))) _setmode(_fileno(stderr), _O_U16TEXT); } Annoyingly _O_U16TEXT was largely undocumented until recently, I don't know if it was available before Visual Studio 2008. The last time I checked, it wasn't available in mingw. Here's the MSDN page for _setmode: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/tw4k6df8%28v=VS.100%29.aspx The '_isatty(_fileno(stdout))' checks that you are writing to the console. You don't want to write UTF-16 when output is piped into a program that expects 8 bit characters. A better solution might be to use the UTF-8 code page for output, but that didn't seem to work, at least not on XP. Finally, remember to make sure your console is using a font that can display the characters you're outputting.