Visual Studio (MSVC) Text Encoding

Microsoft can never escape the historical burden of code pages.

Tag

Text encoding / Mojibake

Date Published

16 Feb 2026

Vendor

Microsoft

Product

Visual Studio

From

English (United States)

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Visual Studio C++ Code editor

Source code:

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("Hello world!🙂\n");
return 0;
}

Text encoding: UTF-8

Execution result:

Hello world!≡ƒÖé

ConsoleApplication1.exe (process 72744) exited with code 0 (0x0).
Press any key to close this window . . .

Visual Studio C++ Source code editor:

#include <stdio.h>
int main()
{
printf("これはテストプログラムです。\n");
}

Text encoding: UTF-8

Compiler warning:
FileName.cpp(1,1): warning C4819: ファイルは、現在のコードページ (932) で表示できない文字を含んでいます。データの損失を防ぐために、ファイルを Unicode 形式で保存してください。 — Compiler warning C4819: The file contains a character that cannot be represented in the current code page (932). Save the file in Unicode format to prevent data loss.

Execution result: 縺薙ｌ縺ｯ繝�繧ｹ繝医�励Ο繧ｰ繝ｩ繝�縺ｧ縺吶��

In Visual Studio 2026, newly created C++ source files have the default text encoding of UTF-8 (without BOM). However, the default compiler (MSVC) configuration in a new project can only parse source files either in the current OS code page or as UTF-8 with BOM. The discrepancy in default configuration causing new source code files being saved as UTF-8, but processed by compiler as the current OS code page.

In the first example, the compiler is parsing the UTF-8 source as Windows 1252, which can parse most valid UTF-8 bytes as Windows 1252 bytes, thus passing the compiler validation silently. In the second example, the compiler is parsing the source as CP 932 (Shift-JIS), which has a stricter set of rules of valid byte sequences, thus triggering compiler warning when parsing UTF-8 bytes.

External links

Source: @ProgrammerCpp