Possible to force CMake/MSVC to use UTF-8 encoding for source files without a BOM? C4819

Question

All our source code is valid UTF-8, however some users on Windows cannot build them because their system is configured for a different encoding.

Without adding a BOM to source files, is it possible to tell MSVC to treat all source as UTF-8, irrespective of the users system encoding?

See MSDN's link regarding this topic (requires adding BOM header).

Answer 1

You can try:

add_compile_options("$<$<C_COMPILER_ID:MSVC>:/utf-8>")
add_compile_options("$<$<CXX_COMPILER_ID:MSVC>:/utf-8>")

By default, Visual Studio detects a byte-order mark to determine if the source file is in an encoded Unicode format, for example, UTF-16 or UTF-8. If no byte-order mark is found, it assumes the source file is encoded using the current user code page, unless you have specified a code page by using /utf-8 or the /source-charset option.

References

• Docs - Visual C++ - ‎Documentation - IDE and Tools - Building - Build Reference: /utf-8 (Set Source and Executable character sets to UTF-8)