TCHAR characters are not displayed correctly

Question

I have a simple code and argv[1] is "Привет".

#include <stdio.h>
#include <tchar.h>
#include <Windows.h>
#include <locale.h>

int _tmain(int argc, TCHAR* argv[])
{
    TCHAR buf[100];

    _fgetts(buf, 100, stdin);

    _tprintf(TEXT("\nargv[1] %s\n"), argv[1]);
    _tprintf(TEXT("%s\n"), buf);
}

In the console, I write "Мир" and have this result:

If I use setlocale(LC_ALL, ""), I have this result:

What should I do to get the correct string in both cases?

The simplest thing would be to simply set your application character set as unicode, and not worry about encoding at all. — Chris Becke, May 12 '17 at 13:17
Possible duplicate of [Output unicode strings in Windows console app](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2492077/output-unicode-strings-in-windows-console-app) — Mgetz, May 12 '17 at 13:19
Are you using of not Unicode? What is you current encoding? Do you get that in the console? Currently, your question is unclear... — Serge Ballesta, May 12 '17 at 13:45
I don't understand why people use TCHAR in new code. TCHAR is a *compatibility hack*. The idea was that you could take your old narrow-encoding code and do a bunch of search-and-replace changes and then compile with -DUNICODE and magically get Unicode awareness. In new code, why wouldn't you just use `wchar_t` and the FooW APIs throughout? — zwol, May 12 '17 at 14:39
@zwol probably because the majority of the Win32 API documentation is still `TCHAR` oriented. Only new APIs are Unicode-only, but older APIs that match the documentation and examples are `TCHAR` based. — Remy Lebeau, May 12 '17 at 15:58

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered May 17 '17 at 10:50

Evidently your program works, except it cannot print correctly on the console window. This is because Windows console is not fully compatible with Unicode. Use _setmode for Visual Studio. This should work for Russian but there could be additional problems with some Asian languages. Use WriteConsole for other compilers.

Visual Studio Example:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <io.h> //for _setmode
#include <fcntl.h> //for _O_U16TEXT

int wmain(int argc, wchar_t* argv[])
{
    _setmode(_fileno(stdout), _O_U16TEXT);
    wprintf(L"%s", L"Привет\n");

    return 0;
}

TCHAR characters are not displayed correctly

1 Answers1