Is it not possible to read and write in non-latin languages like Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, etc?! If so, how, and if not, why?

On Sunday, 15 December 2013 at 08:41:42 UTC, Siavash Babaei wrote:
> Is it not possible to read and write in non-latin languages like Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, etc?! If so, how, and if not, why?

D source files are UTF-8. You can name your variables and functions using the fullw wealth of Unicode.

D provides the string type (and others) for Unicode data.

D has no problem with Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, etc.

Does that answer your question?

Yes and No: I kind of knew that and just wanted to make sure. Thank you for confirming it. On the other hand, when I define a string variable and set it to say, "سلام", and want to output it to the CMD (write, writeln, writef), what I get is gibberish and CMD is set correctly BTW.

FWIW, on my box (Kubuntu, 32bits), without changing anything in my config.

auto s = "سلام";
writeln(s);

Prints the string correctly at the command line (exact same chars).

What OS are you using?

Am Sun, 15 Dec 2013 11:19:43 +0100
schrieb "Siavash Babaei" <siavash.babaei@gmail.com>:

> Yes and No: I kind of knew that and just wanted to make sure. Thank you for confirming it. On the other hand, when I define a string variable and set it to say, "سلام", and want to output it to the CMD (write, writeln, writef), what I get is gibberish and CMD is set correctly BTW.

If you use an older version of Windows you might have to change
the console font to "Lucida" I think it was to support a wider
range of characters.
Then there is a reason why Java has a complicated encoding
system for console output. While on Linux the console uses
UTF-8 (in line with D) for a few years now, the Windows
console usually expects Latin-1 or UTF-16. writeln() doesn't
take this into consideration and I had issues even with German
umlauts on Windows. It worked best when I used the Windows API
directly to write UTF-16 to the console, prefixed with a
byte-order-mark. That together with switching the console font
to Lucida, should give you proper printing of non-ASCII
characters.

If this sounds overly complicated, take a look at Java: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2415597/java-how-to-detect-and-change-encoding-of-system-console

The result is different on Windows, Linux and even Mac unless you work closely with the specific console implementation of the operating system. A general "writeln" doesn't cut it unless you are on Linux or write to files or "pipe" the output to another program understanding UTF-8.

-- 
Marco

I am using Windows 7 Ultimate x64. Maybe PowerShell will do the trick!