GNU gettext utilities: Working in a Windows console
Next: Installing Localizations, Previous: Setting the POSIX Locale, Up: Users [Contents][Index]
2.4 Obtaining good output in a Windows console
On Windows, consoles such as the one started by the cmd.exe
program do input and output in an encoding, called “OEM code page”, that is different from the encoding that text-mode programs usually use, called “ANSI code page”. (Note: This problem does not exist for Cygwin consoles; these consoles do input and output in the UTF-8 encoding.) As a workaround, you may request that the programs produce output in this “OEM” encoding. To do so, set the environment variable OUTPUT_CHARSET
to the “OEM” encoding, through a command such as
set OUTPUT_CHARSET=CP850
Note: This has an effect only on strings looked up in message catalogs; other categories of text are usually not affected by this setting. Note also that this environment variable also affects output sent to a file or to a pipe; output to a file is most often expected to be in the “ANSI” or in the UTF-8 encoding.
Here are examples of the “ANSI” and “OEM” code pages:
Territories | ANSI encoding | OEM encoding |
---|---|---|
Western Europe | CP1252 | CP850 |
Slavic countries (Latin 2) | CP1250 | CP852 |
Baltic countries | CP1257 | CP775 |
Russia | CP1251 | CP866 |