gettext: Working in a Windows console
2.4 Obtaining good output in a Windows console
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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
Info Catalog
gettext: Setting the POSIX Locale
gettext: Users
gettext: Installing Localizations