How can I cin and cout some unicode text?

Question

I ask a code snippet which cin a unicode text, concatenates another unicode one to the first unicode text and the cout the result.

P.S. This code will help me to solve another bigger problem with unicode. But before the key thing is to accomplish what I ask.

ADDED: BTW I can't write in the command line any unicode symbol when I run the executable file. How I should do that?

Answer 1

Here is an example that shows four different methods, of which only the third (C conio) and the fourth (native Windows API) work (but only if stdin/stdout aren't redirected). Note that you still need a font that contains the character you want to show (Lucida Console supports at least Greek and Cyrillic). Note that everything here is completely non-portable, there is just no portable way to input/output Unicode strings on the terminal.

#ifndef UNICODE
#define UNICODE
#endif

#ifndef _UNICODE
#define _UNICODE
#endif

#define STRICT
#define NOMINMAX
#define WIN32_LEAN_AND_MEAN

#include <iostream>
#include <string>
#include <cstdlib>
#include <cstdio>

#include <conio.h>
#include <windows.h>

void testIostream();
void testStdio();
void testConio();
void testWindows();

int wmain() {
    testIostream();
    testStdio();
    testConio();
    testWindows();
    std::system("pause");
}

void testIostream() {
    std::wstring first, second;
    std::getline(std::wcin, first);
    if (!std::wcin.good()) return;
    std::getline(std::wcin, second);
    if (!std::wcin.good()) return;
    std::wcout << first << second << std::endl;
}

void testStdio() {
    wchar_t buffer[0x1000];
    if (!_getws_s(buffer)) return;
    const std::wstring first = buffer;
    if (!_getws_s(buffer)) return;
    const std::wstring second = buffer;
    const std::wstring result = first + second;
    _putws(result.c_str());
}

void testConio() {
    wchar_t buffer[0x1000];
    std::size_t numRead = 0;
    if (_cgetws_s(buffer, &numRead)) return;
    const std::wstring first(buffer, numRead);
    if (_cgetws_s(buffer, &numRead)) return;
    const std::wstring second(buffer, numRead);
    const std::wstring result = first + second + L'\n';
    _cputws(result.c_str());
}

void testWindows() {
    const HANDLE stdIn = GetStdHandle(STD_INPUT_HANDLE);
    WCHAR buffer[0x1000];
    DWORD numRead = 0;
    if (!ReadConsoleW(stdIn, buffer, sizeof buffer, &numRead, NULL)) return;
    const std::wstring first(buffer, numRead - 2);
    if (!ReadConsoleW(stdIn, buffer, sizeof buffer, &numRead, NULL)) return;
    const std::wstring second(buffer, numRead);
    const std::wstring result = first + second;
    const HANDLE stdOut = GetStdHandle(STD_OUTPUT_HANDLE);
    DWORD numWritten = 0;
    WriteConsoleW(stdOut, result.c_str(), result.size(), &numWritten, NULL);
}

• Edit 1: I've added a method based on conio.
• Edit 2: I've messed around with _O_U16TEXT a bit as described in Michael Kaplan's blog, but that seemingly only had wgets interpret the (8-bit) data from ReadFile as UTF-16. I'll investigate this a bit further during the weekend.