Force UTF-8 Tool for Windows Executables (forceu8exe)

This tool embeds a manifest that force I/O using UTF-8 on Widows executables.

They usually performe I/O using legacy encoding (e.g. ISO-8859-1 / Shift-JIS / GBK) by default. To force Unicode on them, we have to use UTF-16 (wide characters) API instead. However, other OSes allow us to use UTF-8 and Unicode in narrow strings. This tool give Windows executables compatibility with other OSes.

Prerequirements

• Windows SDK in Visual C++ (mt.exe)
• Cargo (the package manager of Rust)

How to use

Add Cargo and mt.exe in PATH in advance. x64 Native Tools Command Prompt seems to be the most easily accessible.

cargo install --git https://github.com/tats-u/forceu8exe.git
forceu8exe apply [path of .exe file]

You can also output the manifest to a file like (e.g. foobar.exe.manifest):

forceu8exe manifest foobar.exe.manifest

# snip

add_executable(
    foobar
    foobar.exe
    foobar.exe.manifest # Append here
)

# snip

License

MIT