[Alf P. Steinbach]
I found that the Visual C++ implementation of the C library i/o generally does not support console input of international characters. It can deal with narrow character input from the current codepage, if that codepage is not UTF-8.
Changing the console's codepage isn't the right magic. See http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2008/03/18/8306597.aspx With _O_U16TEXT, VC8+ can write Unicode to the console perfectly. However, I believe that input was broken up to and including VC10, and that it's been fixed in VC11. (I don't know about UTF-8. For reasons that are still mysterious to me, UTF-8 typically isn't handled as well as people expect it to be. Windows really really likes UTF-16 for Unicode. In practice, this is not a big deal, because UTF-8 and UTF-16 are losslessly convertible.) Stephan T. Lavavej Visual C++ Libraries Developer