How to use unicode characters in Windows command line?

user_41360 0
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We have a project in Team Foundation Server (TFS) that has a non-English character (š) in it. When trying to script a few build-related things we've stumbled upon a problem - we can't pass the š letter to the command-line tools. The command prompt or what not else messes it up, and the tf.exe utility can't find the specified project.

I've tried different formats for the .bat file (ANSI, UTF-8 with and without BOM) as well as scripting it in JavaScript (which is Unicode inherently) - but no luck. How do I execute a program and pass it a Unicode command line?

windows-console unicode input command-line
19 Answers

Try:

chcp 65001

which will change the code page to UTF-8. Also, you need to use Lucida console fonts.

user_240540

Actually, the trick is that the command prompt actually understands these non-english characters, just can't display them correctly.

When I enter a path in the command prompt that contains some non-english chracters it is displayed as "?? ?????? ?????". When you submit your command (cd "??? ?????? ?????" in my case), everything is working as expected.

SO_sucks_628300

I found this method as useful in new versions of Windows 10:

Turn on this feature: "Beta: Use Unicode UTF-8 for worldwide language support"

Control panel -> Regional settings -> Administrative tab-> Change system locale...

Region Settings

user_19091320

Starting June 2019, with Windows 10, you won't have to change the codepage.

See "Introducing Windows Terminal" (from Kayla Cinnamon) and the Microsoft/Terminal.
Through the use of the Consolas font, partial Unicode support will be provided.

As documented in Microsoft/Terminal issue 387:

There are 87,887 ideographs currently in Unicode. You need all of them too?
We need a boundary, and characters beyond that boundary should be handled by font fallback / font linking / whatever.

What Consolas should cover:

  • Characters that used as symbols that used by modern OSS programs in CLI.
  • These characters should follow Consolas' design and metrics, and properly aligned with existing Consolas characters.

What Consolas should NOT cover:

  • Characters and punctuation of scripts that beyond Latin, Greek and Cyrillic, especially characters need complex shaping (like Arabic).
  • These characters should be handled with font fallback.
VonC_63090

I see several answers here, but they don't seem to address the question - the user wants to get Unicode input from the command line.

Windows uses UTF-16 for encoding in two byte strings, so you need to get these from the OS in your program. There are two ways to do this -

1) Microsoft has an extension that allows main to take a wide character array: int wmain(int argc, wchar_t *argv[]); https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/6wd819wh.aspx

2) Call the windows api to get the unicode version of the command line wchar_t win_argv = (wchar_t)CommandLineToArgvW(GetCommandLineW(), &nargs); https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/desktop/api/shellapi/nf-shellapi-commandlinetoargvw

Read this: http://utf8everywhere.org for detailed info, particularly if you are supporting other operating systems.

user_3783560

Mind for those using WSL who also do not want the extra packages from Cygwin or Git, wsltty is available which provides just the terminal with UTF-8 support

user_192800080
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