How to use unicode characters in Windows command line

Question

We have a project in Team Foundation Server  TFS  that has a non-English character      in it  When trying to script a few build-related things we ve stumbled upon a problem - we can t pass the    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

User · Answer

This problem is quite annoying  I usually have Chinese character in my filename and file content  Please note that I am using Windows 10  here is my solution   To display the file name  such as dir or ls if you installed Ubuntu bash on Windows 10   Set the region to support non-utf 8 character  After that  console s font will be changed to the font of that locale  and it also changes the encoding of the console     After you have done previous steps  in order to display the file content of a UTF-8 file using command line tool   Change the page to utf-8 by chcp 65001 Change to the font that supports utf-8  such as Lucida Console Use type command to peek the file content  or cat if you installed Ubuntu bash on Windows 10 Please note that  after setting the encoding of the console to utf-8  I can t type Chinese character in the cmd using Chinese input method    The laziest solution  Just use a console emulator such as http   cmder net

User · Answer

This problem is quite annoying  I usually have Chinese character in my filename and file content  Please note that I am using Windows 10  here is my solution   To display the file name  such as dir or ls if you installed Ubuntu bash on Windows 10   Set the region to support non-utf 8 character  After that  console s font will be changed to the font of that locale  and it also changes the encoding of the console     After you have done previous steps  in order to display the file content of a UTF-8 file using command line tool   Change the page to utf-8 by chcp 65001 Change to the font that supports utf-8  such as Lucida Console Use type command to peek the file content  or cat if you installed Ubuntu bash on Windows 10 Please note that  after setting the encoding of the console to utf-8  I can t type Chinese character in the cmd using Chinese input method    The laziest solution  Just use a console emulator such as http   cmder net

User · Answer

As I haven t seen any full answers for Python 2 7  I ll outline the two important steps and an optional step that is quite useful    You need a font with Unicode support  Windows comes with Lucida Console which may be selected by right-clicking the title bar of command prompt and clicking the Defaults option  This also gives access to colours  Note that you can also change settings for command windows invoked in certain ways  e g  open here  Visual Studio  by choosing Properties instead  You need to set the code page to cp65001  which appears to be Microsoft s attempt to offer UTF-7 and UTF-8 support to command prompt  Do this by running chcp 65001 in command prompt  Once set  it remains this way until the window is closed  You ll need to redo this every time you launch cmd exe    For a more permanent solution  refer to this answer on Super User  In short  create a REG SZ  String  entry using regedit at HKEY LOCAL MACHINE Software Microsoft Command Processor and name it AutoRun  Change the value of it to chcp 65001  If you don t want to see the output message from the command  use  chcp 65001 gt nul instead   Some programs have trouble interacting with this encoding  MinGW being a notable one that fails while compiling with a nonsensical error message  Nonetheless  this works very well and doesn t cause bugs with the majority of programs

User · Answer

I had same problem  I m from the Czech Republic   I have an English installation of Windows  and I have to work with files on a shared drive  Paths to the files include Czech-specific characters   The solution that works for me is   In the batch file  change the charset page  My batch file   chcp 1250 copy  O  VEREJN                   xls  c  temp   The batch file has to be saved in CP 1250   Note that the console will not show characters correctly  but it will understand them

User · Answer

As I haven t seen any full answers for Python 2 7  I ll outline the two important steps and an optional step that is quite useful    You need a font with Unicode support  Windows comes with Lucida Console which may be selected by right-clicking the title bar of command prompt and clicking the Defaults option  This also gives access to colours  Note that you can also change settings for command windows invoked in certain ways  e g  open here  Visual Studio  by choosing Properties instead  You need to set the code page to cp65001  which appears to be Microsoft s attempt to offer UTF-7 and UTF-8 support to command prompt  Do this by running chcp 65001 in command prompt  Once set  it remains this way until the window is closed  You ll need to redo this every time you launch cmd exe    For a more permanent solution  refer to this answer on Super User  In short  create a REG SZ  String  entry using regedit at HKEY LOCAL MACHINE Software Microsoft Command Processor and name it AutoRun  Change the value of it to chcp 65001  If you don t want to see the output message from the command  use  chcp 65001 gt nul instead   Some programs have trouble interacting with this encoding  MinGW being a notable one that fails while compiling with a nonsensical error message  Nonetheless  this works very well and doesn t cause bugs with the majority of programs

User · Answer

I had same problem  I m from the Czech Republic   I have an English installation of Windows  and I have to work with files on a shared drive  Paths to the files include Czech-specific characters   The solution that works for me is   In the batch file  change the charset page  My batch file   chcp 1250 copy  O  VEREJN                   xls  c  temp   The batch file has to be saved in CP 1250   Note that the console will not show characters correctly  but it will understand them

User · Answer

Changing code page to 1252 is working for me  The problem for me is the symbol double doller    is converting to another symbol by DOS on Windows Server 2008   I have used CHCP 1252 and a cap before it in my BCP statement

User · Answer

On a Windows nbsp 10 x64 machine  I made the command prompt display non-English characters by   Open an elevated command prompt  run CMD EXE as administrator   Query your registry for available TrueType fonts to the console by       REG query  HKLM SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows NT CurrentVersion Console TrueTypeFont    You ll see an output like       0    REG SZ    Lucida Console     00    REG SZ    Consolas     936    REG SZ             932    REG SZ     MS        Now we need to add a TrueType font that supports the characters you need like Courier New  We do this by adding zeros to the string name  so in this case the next one would be  000        REG ADD  HKLM SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows NT CurrentVersion Console TrueTypeFont   v 000  t REG SZ  d  Courier New    Now we implement UTF-8 support       REG ADD HKCU Console  v CodePage  t REG DWORD  d 65001  f   Set default font to  Courier New        REG ADD HKCU Console  v FaceName  t REG SZ  d  Courier New   f   Set font size to 20       REG ADD HKCU Console  v FontSize  t REG DWORD  d 20  f   Enable quick edit if you like       REG ADD HKCU Console  v QuickEdit  t REG DWORD  d 1  f

User · Answer

I got around a similar issue deleting Unicode-named files by referring to them in the batch file by their short  8 dot 3  names     The short names can be viewed by doing dir  x  Obviously  this only works with Unicode file names that are already known

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

I got around a similar issue deleting Unicode-named files by referring to them in the batch file by their short  8 dot 3  names     The short names can be viewed by doing dir  x  Obviously  this only works with Unicode file names that are already known

User · Answer

One really simple option is to install a Windows bash shell such as MinGW and use that     There is a little bit of a learning curve as you will need to use Unix command line functionality  but you will love the power of it and you can set the console character set to UTF-8      Of course you also get all the usual  nix goodies like grep  find  less  etc

User · Answer

My background  I use Unicode input output in a console for years  and do it a lot daily  Moreover  I develop support tools for exactly this task   There are very few problems  as far as you understand the following facts limitations    CMD and    console    are unrelated factors   CMD exe is a just one of programs which are ready to    work inside    a console     console applications      AFAIK  CMD has perfect support for Unicode  you can enter output all Unicode chars when any codepage is active    Windows    console has A LOT of support for Unicode     but it is not perfect  just    good enough     see below   chcp 65001 is very dangerous   Unless a program was specially designed to work around defects in the Windows    API  or uses a C runtime library which has these workarounds   it would not work reliably   Win8 fixes    of these problems with cp65001  but the rest is still applicable to Win10  I work in cp1252   As I already said  To input output Unicode in a console  one does not need to set the codepage    The details   To read write Unicode to a console  an application  or its C runtime library  should be smart enough to use not File-I O API  but Console-I O API    For an example  see how Python does it   Likewise  to read Unicode command-line arguments  an application  or its C runtime library  should be smart enough to use the corresponding API  Console font rendering supports only Unicode characters in BMP  in other words  below U 10000    Only simple text rendering is supported  so European     and some East Asian     languages should work fine     as far as one uses precomposed forms     There is a minor fine print here for East Asian and for characters U 0000  U 0001  U 30FB     Practical considerations   The defaults on Window are not very helpful   For best experience  one should tune up 3 pieces of configuration    For output  a comprehensive console font   For best results  I recommend my builds    The installation instructions are present there     and also listed in other answers on this page   For input  a capable keyboard layout   For best results  I recommend my layouts  For input  allow HEX input of Unicode   One more gotcha with    Pasting    into a console application  very technical     HEX input delivers a character on KeyUp of Alt  all the other ways to deliver a character happen on KeyDown  so many applications are not ready to see a character on KeyUp    Only applicable to applications using Console-I O API   Conclusion  many application would not react on HEX input events  Moreover  what happens with a    Pasted    character depends on the current keyboard layout  if the character can be typed without using prefix keys  but with arbitrary complicated combination of modifiers  as in Ctrl-Alt-AltGr-Kana-Shift-Gray   then it is delivered on an emulated keypress   This is what any application expects     so pasting anything which contains only such characters is fine  However  the    other    characters are delivered by emulating HEX input    Conclusion  unless your keyboard layout supports input of A LOT of characters without prefix keys  some buggy applications may skip characters when you Paste via Console   s UI  Alt-Space E P    This is why I recommend using my keyboard layouts     One should also keep in mind that the    alternative     more capable    consoles    for Windows are not consoles at all   They do not support Console-I O APIs  so the programs which rely on these APIs to work would not function    The programs which use only    File-I O APIs to the console filehandles    would work fine  though     One example of such non-console is a part of MicroSoft   s Powershell   I do not use it  to experiment  press and release WinKey  then type powershell      On the other hand  there are programs such as ConEmu or ANSICON which try to do more  they    attempt    to intercept Console-I O APIs to make    true console applications    work too   This definitely works for toy example programs  in real life  this may or may not solve your particular problems   Experiment    Summary   set font  keyboard layout  and optionally  allow HEX input   use only programs which go through Console-I O APIs  and accept Unicode command-line arguments   For example  any cygwin-compiled program should be fine   As I already said  CMD is fine too    UPD  Initially  for a bug in cp65001  I was mixing up Kernel and CRTL layers  UPD    and Windows user-mode API     Also  Win8 fixes one half of this bug  I clarified the section about     better console    application  and added a reference to how Python does it

User · Answer

On a Windows nbsp 10 x64 machine  I made the command prompt display non-English characters by   Open an elevated command prompt  run CMD EXE as administrator   Query your registry for available TrueType fonts to the console by       REG query  HKLM SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows NT CurrentVersion Console TrueTypeFont    You ll see an output like       0    REG SZ    Lucida Console     00    REG SZ    Consolas     936    REG SZ             932    REG SZ     MS        Now we need to add a TrueType font that supports the characters you need like Courier New  We do this by adding zeros to the string name  so in this case the next one would be  000        REG ADD  HKLM SOFTWARE Microsoft Windows NT CurrentVersion Console TrueTypeFont   v 000  t REG SZ  d  Courier New    Now we implement UTF-8 support       REG ADD HKCU Console  v CodePage  t REG DWORD  d 65001  f   Set default font to  Courier New        REG ADD HKCU Console  v FaceName  t REG SZ  d  Courier New   f   Set font size to 20       REG ADD HKCU Console  v FontSize  t REG DWORD  d 20  f   Enable quick edit if you like       REG ADD HKCU Console  v QuickEdit  t REG DWORD  d 1  f

User · Answer

Try   chcp 65001   which will change the code page to UTF-8  Also  you need to use Lucida console fonts

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

My background  I use Unicode input output in a console for years  and do it a lot daily  Moreover  I develop support tools for exactly this task   There are very few problems  as far as you understand the following facts limitations    CMD and    console    are unrelated factors   CMD exe is a just one of programs which are ready to    work inside    a console     console applications      AFAIK  CMD has perfect support for Unicode  you can enter output all Unicode chars when any codepage is active    Windows    console has A LOT of support for Unicode     but it is not perfect  just    good enough     see below   chcp 65001 is very dangerous   Unless a program was specially designed to work around defects in the Windows    API  or uses a C runtime library which has these workarounds   it would not work reliably   Win8 fixes    of these problems with cp65001  but the rest is still applicable to Win10  I work in cp1252   As I already said  To input output Unicode in a console  one does not need to set the codepage    The details   To read write Unicode to a console  an application  or its C runtime library  should be smart enough to use not File-I O API  but Console-I O API    For an example  see how Python does it   Likewise  to read Unicode command-line arguments  an application  or its C runtime library  should be smart enough to use the corresponding API  Console font rendering supports only Unicode characters in BMP  in other words  below U 10000    Only simple text rendering is supported  so European     and some East Asian     languages should work fine     as far as one uses precomposed forms     There is a minor fine print here for East Asian and for characters U 0000  U 0001  U 30FB     Practical considerations   The defaults on Window are not very helpful   For best experience  one should tune up 3 pieces of configuration    For output  a comprehensive console font   For best results  I recommend my builds    The installation instructions are present there     and also listed in other answers on this page   For input  a capable keyboard layout   For best results  I recommend my layouts  For input  allow HEX input of Unicode   One more gotcha with    Pasting    into a console application  very technical     HEX input delivers a character on KeyUp of Alt  all the other ways to deliver a character happen on KeyDown  so many applications are not ready to see a character on KeyUp    Only applicable to applications using Console-I O API   Conclusion  many application would not react on HEX input events  Moreover  what happens with a    Pasted    character depends on the current keyboard layout  if the character can be typed without using prefix keys  but with arbitrary complicated combination of modifiers  as in Ctrl-Alt-AltGr-Kana-Shift-Gray   then it is delivered on an emulated keypress   This is what any application expects     so pasting anything which contains only such characters is fine  However  the    other    characters are delivered by emulating HEX input    Conclusion  unless your keyboard layout supports input of A LOT of characters without prefix keys  some buggy applications may skip characters when you Paste via Console   s UI  Alt-Space E P    This is why I recommend using my keyboard layouts     One should also keep in mind that the    alternative     more capable    consoles    for Windows are not consoles at all   They do not support Console-I O APIs  so the programs which rely on these APIs to work would not function    The programs which use only    File-I O APIs to the console filehandles    would work fine  though     One example of such non-console is a part of MicroSoft   s Powershell   I do not use it  to experiment  press and release WinKey  then type powershell      On the other hand  there are programs such as ConEmu or ANSICON which try to do more  they    attempt    to intercept Console-I O APIs to make    true console applications    work too   This definitely works for toy example programs  in real life  this may or may not solve your particular problems   Experiment    Summary   set font  keyboard layout  and optionally  allow HEX input   use only programs which go through Console-I O APIs  and accept Unicode command-line arguments   For example  any cygwin-compiled program should be fine   As I already said  CMD is fine too    UPD  Initially  for a bug in cp65001  I was mixing up Kernel and CRTL layers  UPD    and Windows user-mode API     Also  Win8 fixes one half of this bug  I clarified the section about     better console    application  and added a reference to how Python does it

User · Answer

A better cleaner thing to do  Just install the available  free  Microsoft Japanese language pack   Other oriental language packs will also work  but I have tested the Japanese one    This gives you the fonts with the larger sets of glyphs  makes them the default behavior  changes the various Windows tools like cmd  WordPad  etc

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

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     amp 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 · Answer

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

User · Answer

Changing code page to 1252 is working for me  The problem for me is the symbol double doller    is converting to another symbol by DOS on Windows Server 2008   I have used CHCP 1252 and a cap before it in my BCP statement

User · Answer

For a similar problem   my problem was to show UTF-8 characters from MySQL on a command prompt    I solved it like this    I changed the font of command prompt to Lucida Console   This step must be irrelevant for your situation  It has to do only with what you see on the screen and not with what is really the character   I changed the codepage to Windows-1253  You do this on the command prompt by  chcp 1253   It worked for my case where I wanted to see UTF-8

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

One really simple option is to install a Windows bash shell such as MinGW and use that     There is a little bit of a learning curve as you will need to use Unix command line functionality  but you will love the power of it and you can set the console character set to UTF-8      Of course you also get all the usual  nix goodies like grep  find  less  etc

User · Answer

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

User · Answer

It s is quite difficult to change the default Codepage of Windows console  When you search the web you find different proposals  however some of them may break your Windows entirely  i e  your PC does not boot anymore   The most secure solution is this one  Go to your Registry key HKEY CURRENT USER Software Microsoft Command Processor and add String value Autorun   chcp 65001   Or you can use this small Batch-Script for the most common code pages    ECHO off  SET ROOT KEY  HKEY CURRENT USER    FOR  f  skip 2 tokens 3    i in   reg query HKEY LOCAL MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Control Nls CodePage  v OEMCP   do set OEMCP   i  ECHO System default values   ECHO  ECHO                                                 ECHO Select Codepage  ECHO                                                 ECHO  ECHO 1 - CP1252 ECHO 2 - UTF-8 ECHO 3 - CP850 ECHO 4 - ISO-8859-1 ECHO 5 - ISO-8859-15 ECHO 6 - US-ASCII ECHO  ECHO 9 - Reset to System Default  CP OEMCP   ECHO 0 - EXIT ECHO    SET  P  CP  Select a Codepage     if  CP   1       echo Set default Codepage to CP1252     reg add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 1252 gt nul   f   else if  CP   2       echo Set default Codepage to UTF-8     reg add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 65001 gt nul   f   else if  CP   3       echo Set default Codepage to CP850     reg add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 850 gt nul   f   else if  CP   4       echo Set default Codepage to ISO-8859-1     add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 28591 gt nul   f   else if  CP   5       echo Set default Codepage to ISO-8859-15     add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 28605 gt nul   f   else if  CP   6       echo Set default Codepage to ASCII     add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 20127 gt nul   f   else if  CP   9       echo Reset Codepage to System Default     reg delete   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v AutoRun  f   else if  CP   0       echo Bye   else       echo Invalid choice     pause     Using  chcp 65001 gt nul instead of chcp 65001 suppresses the output  Active code page  65001  you would get every time you start a new command line windows   A full list of all available number you can get from Code Page Identifiers  Note  the settings will apply only for the current user  If you like to set it for all users  replace line SET ROOT KEY  HKEY CURRENT USER  by SET ROOT KEY  HKEY LOCAL MACHINE

User · Answer

Try   chcp 65001   which will change the code page to UTF-8  Also  you need to use Lucida console fonts

User · Answer

Check the language for non-Unicode programs  If you have problems with Russian in the Windows console  then you should set Russian here

User · Answer

A quick decision for  bat files if you computer displays your path file name correct when you typing it in DOS-window    copy con temp txt  press Enter  Type the path file name  press Enter  Press Ctrl-Z  press Enter    This way you create a  txt file - temp txt  Open it in Notepad  copy the text  don t worry it will look unreadable  and paste it in your  bat file  Executing the  bat created this way in DOS-window worked for m   Cyrillic  Bulgarian

User · Answer

Try   chcp 65001   which will change the code page to UTF-8  Also  you need to use Lucida console fonts

User · Answer

A quick decision for  bat files if you computer displays your path file name correct when you typing it in DOS-window    copy con temp txt  press Enter  Type the path file name  press Enter  Press Ctrl-Z  press Enter    This way you create a  txt file - temp txt  Open it in Notepad  copy the text  don t worry it will look unreadable  and paste it in your  bat file  Executing the  bat created this way in DOS-window worked for m   Cyrillic  Bulgarian

User · Answer

It s is quite difficult to change the default Codepage of Windows console  When you search the web you find different proposals  however some of them may break your Windows entirely  i e  your PC does not boot anymore   The most secure solution is this one  Go to your Registry key HKEY CURRENT USER Software Microsoft Command Processor and add String value Autorun   chcp 65001   Or you can use this small Batch-Script for the most common code pages    ECHO off  SET ROOT KEY  HKEY CURRENT USER    FOR  f  skip 2 tokens 3    i in   reg query HKEY LOCAL MACHINE SYSTEM CurrentControlSet Control Nls CodePage  v OEMCP   do set OEMCP   i  ECHO System default values   ECHO  ECHO                                                 ECHO Select Codepage  ECHO                                                 ECHO  ECHO 1 - CP1252 ECHO 2 - UTF-8 ECHO 3 - CP850 ECHO 4 - ISO-8859-1 ECHO 5 - ISO-8859-15 ECHO 6 - US-ASCII ECHO  ECHO 9 - Reset to System Default  CP OEMCP   ECHO 0 - EXIT ECHO    SET  P  CP  Select a Codepage     if  CP   1       echo Set default Codepage to CP1252     reg add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 1252 gt nul   f   else if  CP   2       echo Set default Codepage to UTF-8     reg add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 65001 gt nul   f   else if  CP   3       echo Set default Codepage to CP850     reg add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 850 gt nul   f   else if  CP   4       echo Set default Codepage to ISO-8859-1     add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 28591 gt nul   f   else if  CP   5       echo Set default Codepage to ISO-8859-15     add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 28605 gt nul   f   else if  CP   6       echo Set default Codepage to ASCII     add   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v Autorun  t REG SZ  d   chcp 20127 gt nul   f   else if  CP   9       echo Reset Codepage to System Default     reg delete   ROOT KEY  Software Microsoft Command Processor   v AutoRun  f   else if  CP   0       echo Bye   else       echo Invalid choice     pause     Using  chcp 65001 gt nul instead of chcp 65001 suppresses the output  Active code page  65001  you would get every time you start a new command line windows   A full list of all available number you can get from Code Page Identifiers  Note  the settings will apply only for the current user  If you like to set it for all users  replace line SET ROOT KEY  HKEY CURRENT USER  by SET ROOT KEY  HKEY LOCAL MACHINE

User · Answer

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     amp 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 · Answer

A better cleaner thing to do  Just install the available  free  Microsoft Japanese language pack   Other oriental language packs will also work  but I have tested the Japanese one    This gives you the fonts with the larger sets of glyphs  makes them the default behavior  changes the various Windows tools like cmd  WordPad  etc

User · Answer

For a similar problem   my problem was to show UTF-8 characters from MySQL on a command prompt    I solved it like this    I changed the font of command prompt to Lucida Console   This step must be irrelevant for your situation  It has to do only with what you see on the screen and not with what is really the character   I changed the codepage to Windows-1253  You do this on the command prompt by  chcp 1253   It worked for my case where I wanted to see UTF-8

User · Answer

Try   chcp 65001   which will change the code page to UTF-8  Also  you need to use Lucida console fonts

User · Answer

Check the language for non-Unicode programs  If you have problems with Russian in the Windows console  then you should set Russian here

[unicode] How to use unicode characters in Windows command line?

Examples related to unicode

Examples related to command-line

Examples related to input

Examples related to windows-console