Windows 10 CLI UTF-8 encoding

Question

Problem:

On an english Windows 10 using slovenian keyboard layout, all command line interfaces seem to have a problem with displaying (printing) UTF-8 characters, namely č, š and ž, which are replaced with ?. (I assume all UTF-8 specific characters, since ć and đ also do not work. )

Tested in:

CMD, Powershell, Cmder on Windows 10 64-bit English - Slovenian keyboard layout ... unsuccessful
Intellij IDEA on Windows 10 64-bit English language - Slovenian keyboard layout ... successful -> Works as needed in IDE, but not CLI.
CMD Windows 10 64-bit English language - English keyboard ... successful
CMD Windows 10 64-bit Slovenian languge - Slovenian keyboard layout ... succesful
Several distros of Linux (Ubuntu, Mint, Kali) ... successful

Tried so far:

changing chcp to chcp 65001 ... unsuccessful
creating Autorun file in regedit to force UTF-8 ... unsuccessful
different java compilers ... unsuccessful

Sample code:

public class Test2 {
public static void main(String[] args) {
    System.out.println("č š ž ć đ");

    }
}

CMD:

>javac -encoding UTF-8 test2.java
>java Test2
? ? ? ? ?

Other notes:

Problem appears on several computers running on different hardware. All of the above mentioned characters work fine in all of the above mentioned CLI by default. So the problem only seems to appear with java.

"On an english Windows 10 using slovenian keyboard layout" If you read the entire sentce, you'll get the clarification you're looking for. I do apologize for not listing that English - English and Slovenian - Slovenian was meant as language of OS and keyboard layout. So yes, the problem seems to only appear on Windows 10 64-bit running in English language with Slovenian keyboard layout. Also for further clarification I would like to add that the problem doesn't appear on Windows 10 64-bit English lang, Slo. keyboard layout using IntelliJ IDEA IDE. — user9420260
Your program is attached to a console that it may have inherited from a shell, but the console has nothing directly to do with CMD or PowerShell. It is not a "CMD window". The console system uses instances of a host process (conhost.exe) for the window (Windows 7+) and a device driver (condrv.sys) for the ConDrv device (Windows 8+) that provides console files (Reference, Connect, Input, Output, CurrentIn, CurrentOut, Console). Typically a console client has a handle for Connect (general console API), Input (stdin), and Output (stdout, stderr). — Eryk Sun
The console screen buffer is UCS-2 Unicode and ideally should be written to using WriteConsoleW, a wide-character function. Legacy programs write multibyte strings using WriteFile or WriteConsoleA. The console uses its output codepage (GetConsoleOutputCP and SetConsoleOutputCP) to decode the string in this case. UTF-8 is marginally supported as codepage 65001, but it is extremely buggy depending on the version of Windows. For multibyte input (ReadFile, ReadConsoleA) it's much worse for all versions, including Windows 10, because it fails to read anything except 7-bit ASCII. — Eryk Sun

Andreas Andreas · Accepted Answer · 2018-02-27T19:23:45

Use chcp 65001 then run with java -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 Test2:

chcp 65001
javac -encoding UTF-8 Test2.java
java -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 Test2

Remember to name your Java source file after the class name, case-sensitive.

Windows 10 CLI UTF-8 encoding

2 Answers