C# Unicode (Japanese Characters)

Question

I have a Japanese final coming up soon, so to help me study I made a program to help me study. But, I can't seem to get VS2008 to display any Unicode in the Console. This is a sample I used to see if I could display Unicode:

    string diancai = new string(new char[]{ '\u70B9','\u83DC' });

    Console.Write(diancai[0] + " " + diancai[1]);

Output is:

    ? ?

Please help! Thank you!

Answer 1

Go to your command prompt and try a command "chcp"

It should be like this

C:\> chcp
現在のコード ページ: 932

932 is japanese, If code page is not correct or if your windows does not support, It can't display it in console.

I can run yours in mine, its display following chars, mine is japanese windows.

点 菜

So, For your case, I recommand you to try with GUI program instead of console

Answer 2

There are two conditions that must be satisfied in order for this to work:

1. The console's output encoding must be able to represent Japanese characters
2. The console's font must be able to render them

Condition 1 should be fairly simple to deal with; just set System.Console.OutputEncoding to an appropriate Encoding, such as a UTF8Encoding. (Of course, this won't work on Windows 9x, since that doesn't really support encodings or Unicode. But you aren't using that, now, are you?)

Satisfying condition 2 is a bit more involved:

1. First, an appropriate font must be installed on the user's system. If there aren't any installed yet, the user will have to install some, perhaps by:

   • Opening intl.cpl ("Regional and Language Options" in the Control Panel on Windows XP in English)
   • Going to the "Languages" tab
   • Enabling "Install files for East Asian languages"
   • Clicking "OK"

2. Actually getting the console to use such a font seems to be fairly hairy; see the question: How to display japanese Kanji inside a cmd window under windows? for more about that.