Unicode characters in window caption

Question

We're having trouble setting window captions using cyrillic or japanese characters. We either see question marks or random garbage, but not the text we want. We've tried using different encodings, SetWindowText(), SetWindowTextW(), SetWindowTextA(), and so on. We can't even get it to work by passing a string literal to SetWindowText().

Our Windows install does appear to have everything it needs - Internet Explorer and Firefox do show cyrillic and japanese captions correctly, for example. So I'm pretty sure we're not finding the correct encoding/method combination. Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You have to compile your application with _UNICODE defined. Otherwise all windows will still be MBCS and not utf-16 and therefore can't show cyrillic or japanese characters if the codepage doesn't match.

Answer 2

SetWindowText()? Did you compile your application as Unicode? If not, SetWindowText() is equivalent to SetWindowTextA(), which in turn is limited to your current system locale (aka "Language for non-Unicode applications").

Also, how did you CREATE your window? Using an explicitely Unicode-aware API such as CreateWindowExW()? If not, make sure that your program is compiled as Unicode.

If your program is not compiled as Unicode, you might want to either modify your "Language for non-Unicode applications" in CP/Regional Options. Reboot required. Or more easily: Use MS AppLocale to simulate a cyrillic system locale

Answer 3

The problem you've got (at a guess) is that the top-level frame window of your application is an ANSI window. Under the hood, when you create a window (with CreateWindow() or CreateWindowEx()) a window class must be supplied. This window class determines the window's properties, including whether or not it, by default, accepts ANSI messages or Unicode messages. In turn, this is set by whether you (or your framework) register the window class by calling RegisterClassExA() or RegisterClassExW().

What's almost certainly happing is that your top-level window's class is being registered with RegisterClassExA(). This means that the default window procedure for the window will translate all Unicode strings in messages to ANSI before processing them, hence the question marks and odd characters everywhere.

The easiest solution to all this is to just make your application Unicode throughout (usually done by defining _UNICODE). The other way is to figure out where RegisterClassEx() is being called, and make it RegisterClassExW(). This may cause ANSI/Unicode issues with other messages, but it should (in theory, at least) work. Of course, either way will break Windows 9X, if that's an issue.

If all this sounds horrendously complicated, you're not wrong ...