Greek letters in Windows Concole

Question

I'm writting a program in C and I want to have Greek characters in the menu when I run it in cmd.exe . Someone said that in order to include Greek characters you have to use a printf that goes something like this:

 printf(charset:IS0-1089:uffe);      

but they weren't sure.

Does anyone know how to do that?

Answer 1

Assuming Windows, you can:

• set your console font to a Unicode TrueType font:
• emit the data using an "ANSI" mechanism

This code prints γειά σου:

#include "windows.h"

int main() {
  SetConsoleOutputCP(1253); //"ANSI" Greek
  printf("\xE3\xE5\xE9\xDC \xF3\xEF\xF5");
  return 0;
}

The hex codes represent γειά σου when encoded as windows-1253. If you use an editor that saves data as windows-1253, you can use literals instead. An alternative would be to use either OEM 737 (that really is a DOS encoding) or use Unicode.

I used SetConsoleOutputCP to set the console code page, but you could type the command chcp 1253 prior to running the program instead.