Probably nothing: Maybe you just have to tell Visual Studio it’s an UTF-8-encoded string!
The std::string class can be used to store UTF-8-encoded Unicode text.
For example:
std::string s{"LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH GRAVE (U+00E8): \xC3\xA8"};
However, in the Locals window, instead of the expected è (Latin small letter e with grave, U+00E8), Visual Studio displays some (apparently) garbage characters, like a Latin capital letter A with tilde, followed by diaeresis.
Why is that? Is there a bug in our C++ code? Did we pick the wrong UTF-8 bytes for ‘è’?
No. The UTF-8 encoding for è (U+00E8) is exactly the 2-byte sequence 0xC3 0xA8, so the above C++ code is correct.
The problem is that Visual Studio doesn’t use the UTF-8 encoding to display that string in the Locals window. It turns out that VS is probably using the Windows-1252 code page (a character encoding commonly mislabeled as “ANSI” on Windows…). And, in this character encoding, the first byte 0xC3 is mapped to à (U+00C3: Latin capital letter A with tilde), and the second byte 0xA8 is mapped to ¨ diaeresis (U+00A8).
To display the string content using the correct UTF-8 encoding, you can use the explicit “s8” format specifier. For example, typing in the Command Window:
? &s[0],s8
the correct string is displayed, as this time the bytes in the std::string variable are interpreted as a UTF-8 sequence.
Similarly, the s8 format specifier can be used in the Watch window as well.
