Isn't there a setting (ie on the compiler or in the exe manifest, etc) now under Windows to mark your exe as UTF8 such that your exe sees UTF8 as the active code page, regardless of what the OS has as the active code page?

Be seeing you,

Tony

On Thu., Jul. 2, 2026, 7:47 p.m. Herb Sutter via SG16, <sg16@lists.isocpp.org> wrote:

Hi C++ Unicode folks, literally asking for a friend (Christopher, on the To: line so please Reply-All)…

 

His project team wants to use UTF-8 in their code base and they hoped to switch to u8string[_view] and char8_t throughout, but they encountered two sets of limitations:

 

• In the standard, those types don’t seem to work with std::format and streams.

 

• On Windows, platform APIs interpret narrow characters using the active code page (e.g., std::cout emits mojibake, filesystem::path{std::string} UTF-8 paths are mangled or throw).

 

What’s the current best guidance for adopting UTF-8 in C++ code?

 

Thank you,

 

Herb

 

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