Greek letters in Windows Concole

Question

I'm writting a program in C and I want to have Greek characters in the menu when I run it in cmd.exe . Someone said that in order to include Greek characters you have to use a printf that goes something like this:

 printf(charset:IS0-1089:uffe);

but they weren't sure.

Does anyone know how to do that?

Recalling old memoirs, I remember we had to do a setting in DOS itself to change the "code page". Don't remember - it's been a long time since I coded in DOS. — itsols, May 29 '11 at 15:16
@Radek me for example, developing on an embedded device for car diagnosis (legacy stuff anyway, but still in heavy use by our customers). — Federico klez Culloca, May 29 '11 at 15:16
I suspect the question is not about MS-DOS but running in a console on Windows. — Michael Burr, May 29 '11 at 15:28
@Michael you're right. Now that I think of it I don't know why my book says MS-DOS in the first place. — system, May 29 '11 at 15:51
Please edit the question to correctly specify if you mean legacy MS-DOS or a recent windows dos box/console. — Chris Stratton, May 29 '11 at 15:55
To reinforce what Chris says, it's important to know which because the answer is *different* in the two cases; there have been profound changes in this area over the years. — Donal Fellows, May 29 '11 at 15:56
Possible duplicate of [How to Output Unicode Strings on the Windows Console](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3130979/how-to-output-unicode-strings-on-the-windows-console) — phuclv, May 28 '17 at 04:05
[Output unicode strings in Windows console app](https://stackoverflow.com/q/2492077/995714), [Output Unicode to console Using C++, in Windows](https://stackoverflow.com/q/2849010/995714)... — phuclv, May 28 '17 at 04:06

score 4 · Answer 1 · edited May 28 '17 at 08:45

Assuming Windows, you can:

set your console font to a Unicode TrueType font:
emit the data using an "ANSI" mechanism

This code prints γειά σου:

#include "windows.h"

int main() {
  SetConsoleOutputCP(1253); //"ANSI" Greek
  printf("\xE3\xE5\xE9\xDC \xF3\xEF\xF5");
  return 0;
}

The hex codes represent γειά σου when encoded as windows-1253. If you use an editor that saves data as windows-1253, you can use literals instead. An alternative would be to use either OEM 737 (that really is a DOS encoding) or use Unicode.

I used SetConsoleOutputCP to set the console code page, but you could type the command chcp 1253 prior to running the program instead.

Davislor · Answer 2 · 2017-05-28T08:47:43.307

One way to do this is to print a wide string. Unfortunately, Windows needs a bit of non-standard setup to make this work. This code does that setup inside #if blocks.

#include <locale.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>

/* This has been reported not to autodetect correctly on tdm-gcc. */
#ifndef MS_STDLIB_BUGS // Allow overriding the autodetection.
#  if ( _WIN32 || _WIN64 )
#    define MS_STDLIB_BUGS 1
#  else
#    define MS_STDLIB_BUGS 0
#  endif
#endif

#if MS_STDLIB_BUGS
#  include <io.h>
#  include <fcntl.h>
#endif

void init_locale(void)
// Does magic so that wprintf() can work.
{
  // Constant for fwide().
  static const int wide_oriented = 1;

#if MS_STDLIB_BUGS
  // Windows needs a little non-standard magic.
  static const char locale_name[] = ".1200";
  _setmode( _fileno(stdout), _O_WTEXT );
#else
  // The correct locale name may vary by OS, e.g., "en_US.utf8".
  static const char locale_name[] = "";
#endif

  setlocale( LC_ALL, locale_name );
  fwide( stdout, wide_oriented );
}

int main(void)
{
  init_locale();
  wprintf(L"μουσάων Ἑλικωνιάδων ἀρχώμεθ᾽\n");
  return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}

This has to be saved as UTF-8 with a BOM in order for older versions of Visual Studio to read it properly. Your console also has to be set to a monospaced Unicode font, such as Lucida Console, to display it properly. To mix wide strings in with ASCII strings, the standard defines the %ls and %lc format specifiers to printf(), although I’ve found these don’t work everywhere.

An alternative is to set the console to UTF-8 mode (On Windows, do this with chcp 65001.) and then print the UTF-8 string with printf(u8"μουσάων Ἑλικωνιάδων ἀρχώμεθ᾽\n");. UTF-8 is a second-class citizen on Windows, but that usually works. Try to run that without setting the code page first, though, and you will get garbage.

score 0 · Answer 3 · edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

0

I think this might only work if your console supports Greek. Probably what you want to do is to map characters to the Greek, but using ASCII. For C# but same idea in C.

913 to 936 = upper case Greek letters

945 to 968 = lower case Greek letters

Read more at Suite101: Working with the Greek Alphabet and C#: How to Display ASCII Codes Correctly when Creating a C# Application | Suite101.com at this link.

edited Jun 20 '20 at 09:12

Community

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answered May 29 '11 at 15:15

tofutim

22,664
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Big difference between DOS and an app that runs in the Console. – vcsjones May 29 '11 at 15:18
Right - but the point is to use the mapping - shift the abc's to the Greek ASCII numbers. – tofutim May 29 '11 at 16:16

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered May 29 '11 at 15:49

0

you can print a unicode char characters by using printf like this :

printf("\u0220\n");

this will print Ƞ

answered May 29 '11 at 15:49

eyadof

318
3
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Greek letters in Windows Concole

4 Answers4

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