Why does wprintf transliterate Russian text in Unicode into Latin on Linux?

by

Because conversion of wide characters is done according to the currently set locale. By default a C program always starts with a “C” locale which only supports ASCII characters.

You have to switch to any Russian or UTF-8 locale first:

setlocale(LC_ALL, "ru_RU.utf8"); // Russian Unicode
setlocale(LC_ALL, "en_US.utf8"); // English US Unicode

Or to a current system locale (which is likely what you need):

setlocale(LC_ALL, "");

The full program will be:

#include <stdio.h>
#include <wchar.h>
#include <locale.h>

int main() {
  setlocale(LC_ALL, "ru_RU.utf8");
  wprintf(L"Привет, мир!\n");
}

As for your code working as-is on other machines – this is due to how libc operates there. Some implementations (like musl) do not support non-Unicode locales and thus can unconditionally translate wide characters to an UTF-8 sequence.

Leave a Comment

tech