R – Unicode characters in window caption

internationalizationlocalizationunicodewinapi

We're having trouble setting window captions using cyrillic or japanese characters. We either see question marks or random garbage, but not the text we want. We've tried using different encodings, SetWindowText(), SetWindowTextW(), SetWindowTextA(), and so on. We can't even get it to work by passing a string literal to SetWindowText().

Our Windows install does appear to have everything it needs – Internet Explorer and Firefox do show cyrillic and japanese captions correctly, for example. So I'm pretty sure we're not finding the correct encoding/method combination. Any suggestions?

Best Solution

SetWindowText()? Did you compile your application as Unicode? If not, SetWindowText() is equivalent to SetWindowTextA(), which in turn is limited to your current system locale (aka "Language for non-Unicode applications").

Also, how did you CREATE your window? Using an explicitely Unicode-aware API such as CreateWindowExW()? If not, make sure that your program is compiled as Unicode.

If your program is not compiled as Unicode, you might want to either modify your "Language for non-Unicode applications" in CP/Regional Options. Reboot required. Or more easily: Use MS AppLocale to simulate a cyrillic system locale

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