WideCharToMultiByte problem

Question

I have the lovely functions from my previous question, which work fine if I do this:

wstring temp;
wcin >> temp;

string whatever( toUTF8(getSomeWString()) );

// store whatever, copy, but do not use it as UTF8 (see below)

wcout << toUTF16(whatever) << endl;

The original form is reproduced, but the in between form often contains extra characters. If I enter for example àçé as the input, and add a cout << whatever statement, i'll get …‡‚ as output.

Can I still use this string to compare to others, procured from an ASCII source? Or asked differently: if I would output …‡‚ through the UTF8 cout in linux, would it read àçé? Is the byte content of a string àçé, read in UTF8 linux by cin, exactly the same as what the Win32 API gets me?

Thanks!

PS: the reason I'm asking is because I need to use the string a lot to compare to other read values (comparing and concatenating...).

Answer 1

Let's start by me saying that it appears that there is simply no way to output UTF-8 text to the console in Windows via cout (assuming you compile with Visual Studio). What you can do however for your tests is to output your UTF-8 text via the Win32 API fn WriteConsoleA:

if(!SetConsoleOutputCP(CP_UTF8)) { // 65001
    cerr << "Failed to set console output mode!\n";
    return 1;
}
HANDLE const consout = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);
DWORD nNumberOfCharsWritten;
const char* utf8 = "Umlaut AE = \xC3\x84 / ue = \xC3\xBC \n";
if(!WriteConsoleA(consout, utf8, strlen(utf8), &nNumberOfCharsWritten, NULL)) {
    DWORD const err = GetLastError();
    cerr << "WriteConsole failed with << " << err << "!\n";
    return 1;
}

This should output: Umlaut AE = Ä / ue = ü if you set your console (cmd.exe) to use the Lucida Console font.

As for your question (taken from your comment) if

a win23 API converted string is the same as a raw UTF8 (linux) string

I will say yes: Given a Unicode character sequence, it's UTF-16 (Windows wchar_t) representation converted to a UTF-8 (char) representation via the WideCharToMultiByte function will always yield the same byte sequence.

Answer 2

When you convert the string to a UTF 16 it is a 16 byte wide character, you can't compare it to the ASCII values because they aren't 16 byte values. You have to convert them to compare, or write a specialized comparision to ASCII function.

I doubt the UTF8 cout in linux would produce the same correct output unless it were regular ASCII values, as UTF8 UTF-8 encoding forms are binary-compatible with ASCII for code points below 128, and I assume UTF16 comes after UTF8 in a simliar fashion.

The good news is there are many converters out there written to convert these strings to different character sets.