Encoding of console output stream in windows

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?

You already asked five (!) questions all about problems related to using `wchar_t`, and you keep repeating that you "must use UTF-16". So, *why* do you have to use UTF-16 when you admit that UTF-8 just works? — Yakov Galka, Oct 24 '12 at 15:00

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Oct 24 '12 at 15:05

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.

Encoding of console output stream in windows

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