Specification of source charset encoding in MSVC++, like gcc "-finput-charset=CharSet"

Question

Hello,

I want to create some sample programs that deal with encodings, specifically I want to use wide strings like:

wstring a=L"grüßen";
wstring b=L"שלום עולם!";
wstring c=L"中文";

Because these are example programs.

This is absolutely trivial with gcc that treats source code as UTF-8 encoded text. But,straightforward compilation does not work under MSVC. I know that I can encode them using escape sequences but I would prefer to keep them as readable text.

Is there any option that I can specify as command line switch for "cl" in order to make this work? There there any command line switch like gcc'c -finput-charset

Thanks,

If not how would you suggest make the text natural for user?

Note: adding BOM to UTF-8 file is not an option because it becomes non-compilable by other compilers.

Note2: I need it to work in MSVC Version >= 9 == VS 2008

The real answer: There is no solution

Answer 1

For VS you can use:

#pragma setlocale( "[locale-string]" )

The default ANSI code page of the locale will be used as file encoding.

But in general is a bad idea to hard-code any user-visible strings in your code. Store them in some kind of resources. Good for localization, easy spell-checking and updating, etc.

Answer 2

IMHO all C++ source files should be in strict ASCII. Comments can be in UTF-8 if the editor supports it.

This makes the code portable across platforms, editors and source control systems.

You can use \u to put Unicode characters into a wide string:

std::wstring str = L"\u20AC123,00"; //€123,00