How to Handle Special Characters in Visual Studio 2019 C Projects and Execute CMD Commands with Them?

Special Characters in Visual Studio 2019 C Projects and Executing CMD Commands with Them

This issue arises when attempting to utilize Baltic characters in the console and executing CMD commands incorporating those characters within the default console C application.

Encoding-Related Challenges

By default, the console in Visual Studio 2019 C projects uses a different text encoding than the source code. As a result, special characters may not display correctly in the console.

Resolving Encoding Issues

To ensure correct display of special characters, the following steps are recommended:

1. Set the Source Code Encoding: Use the compiler option /source-charset:utf-8 to specify that the source code is encoded in UTF-8.
2. Set Executable Encoding: Use the compiler option /execution-charset:utf-8 to indicate that the resulting executable should use UTF-8 encoding.
3. Set Runtime Locale: Within the program code, use std::locale::global(std::locale{".utf-8"}) to set the global locale to UTF-8.
4. Set Stream Locale: Set the locale for input and output streams using std::cout.imbue(std::locale{""}) and std::cin.imbue(std::locale{""}). The empty quotes instruct the streams to use the default system locale, which should match the encoding used in the console.

CMD Command Execution with Special Characters

To execute CMD commands with special characters, ensure that the characters are properly encoded. In particular, the Latin1 encoding is often required for file system operations involving special characters.

As an example, to create a file with a Latvian character using CMD, the following can be used:

<code class="cpp">system(("copy /-y \"C:\Users\Janis\Desktop\TEST2\" + s2 + ".txt\" \"C:\PACIENTI\" + s2 + ".txt\"").c_str());</code>

This command will create the file "Latvian.txt" in the specified directory using a special character enclosed in double quotes.

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