[fpc-pascal] Console Encoding in Windows (Local VS. UTF8)

[Noah Silva]

Hi,

I deal with in Japanese (and sometimes other languages) in a lot of my
programs, and nothing I do seems to work consistently on Windows systems.
 (OS X is no problem).

I have followed steps in the Wiki, etc., but to little avail, so I have
some questions for anyone who knows more than me:
1. What encoding "should" I be writing to the terminal?  from experimenting
with text files using the cat command in powershell, it seems that local
("ANSI") encoding should be used.  This makes sense since older versions of
windows only supported local encodings.
2. Is there any reason why writing out data in the local encoding (with
write statements, etc.) should get corrupted?  For example is some level of
the RTL assuming something about the encoding? (I don't think so, but...)
3. Is there a way to set the output to UTF8 so I can just write out UTF8
and be done with it?

Just to give an example:
1. I read in an SJIS CSV file, and display it on the screen, and it's
corrupted.
2. I convert it to UTF8 before displaying it, and it's still corrupted.
3.I cat the file to the screen and it's ok.
4. I write the output to a file instead of the console, and it's ok.

Something seems odd.

Does anyone else have these issues?

Thank you,
    Noah Silva

p.s.: I know that the actual data in my programs isn't broken, because if I
write it to a file or database, there is no problem with corruption.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.freepascal.org/pipermail/fpc-pascal/attachments/20130709/ad009c57/attachment.html>