2.4 Obtaining good output in a Windows console ¶

On Windows, consoles such as the one started by the cmd.exe program do input and output in an encoding, called “OEM code page”, that is different from the encoding that text-mode programs usually use, called “ANSI code page”. (Note: This problem does not exist for Cygwin consoles; these consoles do input and output in the UTF-8 encoding.) As a workaround, you may request that the programs produce output in this “OEM” encoding. To do so, set the environment variable OUTPUT_CHARSET to the “OEM” encoding, through a command such as

set OUTPUT_CHARSET=CP850

Note: This has an effect only on strings looked up in message catalogs; other categories of text are usually not affected by this setting. Note also that this environment variable also affects output sent to a file or to a pipe; output to a file is most often expected to be in the “ANSI” or in the UTF-8 encoding.

Here are examples of the “ANSI” and “OEM” code pages: