c++visual-studiocodepages

Can I point the necessary codepage for the individual string variable in the `Watch1` window?

Visual Studio 2015, C++ language, debugging.

In the Watch1 window I look the values of my variables (strings) of the wchar_t* and char* types. The first of them is Unicode and the second is ANSI (CP_OEMCP codepage). In the Watch1 window the text of the wchar_t* variable is displaying correctly, but the text of the char* variable is displaying unreadable. Can I point the necessary codepage for the individual string variable in the Watch1 window? I want to see both values of my strings correctly in the Watch1 window.

Maybe for such cases is exists the some syntax, similar the $err,hr (the text of the last error, which was gotten via the GetLastError() function).

UPD (the screen added)

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Console window has the right output, but in the memory and in the Watch1 window I see unreadable string for my ansiText variable.

Solution

  • The problem is that the original string (starting with hex values 8D A0 A6) is not on Windows-1251 (Windows Cyrillic) code page, but on OEM 866 code page. These two are different, and Visual Studio expects Windows-1251, because that's system's code page (code page used for non-Unicode applications).

    It is not possible to specify a code page when you watch a string in debugger. Everything inside should be Unicode anyway, or at least UTF-8, and for those two there are format specifiers, su and s8. See MSDN for all format specifiers.

    What you can do is have the following function integrated in the code, and when you want to see some non-ANSI (or non-CP_ACP, to be precise) string just call this function with the string and code page as parameters (but use the function only once in Watch window):

    LPCWSTR ViewString(LPCSTR szString, UINT nCodePage)
{
    static WCHAR szTemp[1024];
    MultiByteToWideChar(nCodePage, 0, szString, -1, szTemp, 1024);
    return szTemp;
}

    So, in your case in Watch window instead of (char*)ansiText there would be ViewString(ansiText, 866). Also, note that this is not actually "ANSI text", but "OEM text".

    I don't know what exactly your program is supposed to do, but I would convert all non-Unicode strings to Unicode at the earliest point in code (right where you get a non-Unicode string), and in your code always work just with Unicode strings. To convert OEM 866 string to Unicode you can use function MultiByteToWideChar with CodePage parameter = 866.