Output Polish Language Chars

Hi. I am trying to write a program that outputs Polish language characters to the ms-dos console, but am running into trouble. Evidently, I have to use something outside the 256 ascii character-set. Can anyone point me in a helpful direction? Thanks, Steve

For console based programs you are going to need to get into what is called code pages. A code page defines a mapping of of character codes to to characters. These are set up so the lower 128 characters are the standard ASCII characters whereas the higher 128 codes depend on the language of the code page.

To do this for console programming you will need to ensure the code page is installed on your system. It is located here:

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Contro l\Nls\CodePage

in the registry.

If you have the code page installed on your system you can set console input by using

Code:

BOOL SetConsoleCP( UINT wCodePageID)

where wCodePageID is one of the registry entries contained above.

Code:

BOOL SetConsoleOutputCP( UINT wCodepageID)

these files are located in windows.h and you read up on them at
MSDN

I'm not sure it would work under MS-DOS, but if anyone with a similar problem is using different platforums, Unicode is another option. It's a character set that is probably one of the most universal in common usage. Java uses it, and it's been implemented in .NET.

edit: As for the above post, if it's true MS-DOS and not just a console window, I'm not so sure about all the registry stuff...

UNICODE does solve all these problems however I do believe (however I am not sure) that it wasn't designed for use with console programs.

Well you'd just need to get an API that works in DOS. They're out there for just about every platform.

That would be what I posted above.

Outputting unicode characters to the windows console is a bit of a mess. In theory, we should be able to use wprintf or wcout. In reality, these seem to be unreliable at best and probably totally broken. Fortunately, the native windows functions seem to work fine.

Here is a sample program. It requires MSVC.NET and the source must be saved as unicode. Dev-C++ will not compile unicode source files, so for that compiler, some alterations must be made.

Code:

#include <windows.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#include <iostream>
#include <strsafe.h>
using namespace std;

/*
 * Version of wprintf that uses windows functions
 */
DWORD win_wprintf(LPCWSTR szFormat, ...)
{
#       ifndef ARRAY_SIZE
#         define ARRAY_SIZE(arr) (sizeof(arr) / sizeof((arr)[0]))
#       endif

	WCHAR   szText[1024 * 10];
	va_list args;
	DWORD   dwWritten;
 
	/* Format the text into the buffer */
	va_start(args, szFormat);
	StringCchVPrintfW(szText, ARRAY_SIZE(szText), szFormat, args);
	va_end(args);
 
	/* Output the buffer to the console. */
	if (WriteConsoleW(GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE), szText, lstrlenW(szText), &dwWritten, NULL))
	{
		return dwWritten;
	}

	return 0;
}


int main(void)
{
	printf("Before continuing make sure the console font is set to 'Lucida Console'\n");
	getchar();

	/* Try with the C std library. */
	wprintf(L"ęŃźŚłŁĘĄĆŻżÓaz09!> %s\n", L"Ććó");

	/* Try with the C++ std library. */
	wcout << L"ęŃźŚłŁĘĄĆŻżÓaz09!> " << L"Ććó" << endl;

	/* Try with the windows replacement. */
	win_wprintf(L"ęŃźŚłŁĘĄĆŻżÓaz09!> %s\n", L"Ććó");

	getchar();
}

In my testing, wprintf and wcout output nothing while win_wprintf gives the correct result.