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On Windows 7, dir or tree can't show unicode characters, even starting cmd with cmd /U

So I would press Window Key + R to run something, and type in cmd /U so that the content might handle Unicode.

And then using dir or tree /F, the content in Unicode won't show as Unicode. (in Window Explorer (file manager), the Unicode will show)

Is there a way to handle it? To get Unicode characters to test your filenames, you can go to

http://news.google.com/news?edchanged=1&ned=tw

and you will be able to get many Unicode characters there (UTF-8)

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Have you tried this with Powershell yet? Windows 7 has it installed by default. – WebDevHobo Jun 27 '10 at 1:25
If I use PowerShell, and do a help ls -full it doesn't have such option as cmd's dir /B – 動靜能量 Jun 27 '10 at 5:03
Remember, PowerShell pipes objects between commands - you can get behavior similar to dir /b by executing: dir | % { $_.Name } – Goyuix Nov 18 '10 at 14:27
@Guyuix: Or gci | select -expand Name – Joey Apr 10 '11 at 8:32
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2 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

Change the font for the console window to a TrueType font, such as Lucida Console or Consolas. With raster fonts you are restricted to the OEm character set.

cmd /u only changes output piped into files, not what you see on screen.

PowerShell by default uses a TrueType font which is why it worked for you.

This has nothing to do with cmd.

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Even if I change to Lucida or Consolas and run cmd /u, I don't get the Unicode characters. – Snark Apr 10 '11 at 8:07
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If you see boxes, then it does indeed work. The console subsystem does not support font switching so it can only use glyphs from the single font you specified. And since neither font has glyphs for Han ideographs you'll see only boxes. However, the text is there; you can copy and paste it, for example. You won't see anything different in PowerShell, though, unless you use the PowerShell ISE (which is not a console application and therefore not subject to the same limitations). – Joey Apr 10 '11 at 8:31
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up vote 0 down vote

It's not just a command prompt problem, but a Windows problem in general. The C "wide-character" functions in Windows (namely wprintf) do not support Unicode.

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Proof for your claim? MSDN constantly mentions the wide-char variants for Unicode. – Joey Apr 10 '11 at 8:34
Here's one. – Mehrdad Apr 10 '11 at 8:37
you are aware that that is a bug that was reported on a prerelease version of Visual Studio 2005 and has been long fixed (not to mention that we're at VS 2010 by now ...)? Note also that the Windows API can easily be used and there is no particular reason to use the C standard library in places where no portability problems are likely to be encountered. – Joey Apr 10 '11 at 20:18
@Joey: No, I wasn't aware of that. However, right now I'm using Visual Studio 2008 and calling wprintf(L"私"), and it's definitely not printing anything Unicode. Do you have any example of complex scripts that do get printed with wprintf? (Locale changing shouldn't be needed because the strings are UTF-16.) – Mehrdad Apr 10 '11 at 20:24
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