{"id":2203,"date":"2014-06-05T16:00:15","date_gmt":"2014-06-05T23:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/?p=2203"},"modified":"2014-10-03T12:19:05","modified_gmt":"2014-10-03T19:19:05","slug":"unicode-and-the-windows-console","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.curlybrace.com\/words\/2014\/06\/unicode-and-the-windows-console\/","title":{"rendered":"Unicode and the Windows Console"},"content":{"rendered":"

Update: after several more hours of Googling and experimenting, I have found a way to display Japanese in the Console. For more information, check out my new post, “Windows Console and Double\/Multi Byte Character Set<\/a>“.<\/strong> The rest of this post is still accurate with regards to Unicode support and Western system locales.<\/p>\n

Have you been hoping to see Japanese (or Thai, Hindi, Arabic, etc.) characters appear when you type dir<\/code> into your command prompt? Well, prepare to be disappointed, as the Windows CMD.exe Console cannot<\/em> display Unicode characters<\/a>. You’ll have to use the Powershell ISE if you want to see full Unicode text output.<\/p>\n

The best that the Command Shell can do is to write out boxes or question marks and, when characters are marked and copied, the clipboard will be populated with the correct Unicode characters. Those characters can then be pasted into smarter executables, like Notepad.<\/p>\n

Michael S. Kaplan, an expert on all things Unicode and Microsoft, wrote about this at great length on MSDN Blogs. Unfortunately, Microsoft decided to wipe his blog from the Internet, even though it breaks links from the likes of Raymond Chen’s The Old New Thing.<\/p>\n

Michael’s relevant blog posts can be found on The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine:<\/p>\n