winapi - How to read/write Chinese/Japanese characters from/to INI files?

Question

Using WritePrivateProfileString and GetPrivateProfileString results in ??? instead of the real characters.

Answer 1

GetPrivateProfileString() and WritePrivateProfileString() will work with Unicode, sort of.

If the ini file is UTF-16LE encoded, i.e. it has a UTF-16 BOM, then the functions will work in Unicode. However if the functions have to create the file they will create an ANSI file and only work in ANSI.

So to use the functions with Unicode, create your ini file before you first use it and write a UTF-16LE Byte Order Mark to it. Then carry on as normal.

Note that the functions do not work at all with UTF-8.

See Michael Kaplan's blog for more detail than you ever wanted to know about this.