Cannot print special characters to console

Question

When I try to output "ᕦ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ᕤ" to console it's just a bunch of question marks.

I have tried messing with System.Console.OutputEncoding with no success.

How can I achieve my utmost important goal of printing the "ᕦ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ᕤ".

Most likely the font for the console does not support those characters. I think you'l have to change the default font used for the console. — Erik Philips, Feb 20 '15 at 16:54
Probably has to do with UTF8-characters see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2062875/show-utf8-characters-in-console — Drifter, Feb 20 '15 at 16:57
The console is ANSI by default. Making it unicode is a bit tricky, short answer being "don't". You probably don't want it to be *the* windows console, right? Just make a form that looks like the console :D — Luaan, Feb 20 '15 at 16:58
@Drifter: Nope; this has nothing to do with UTF-8 specifically. It has to do with the font the console uses and unicode in general: [The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)](http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/Unicode.html) — RobIII, Feb 20 '15 at 17:06

score 2 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 11:57

This works reasonably well (as in: the shape is more recognizable):

Console.OutputEncoding = Encoding.Unicode;
Console.WriteLine("ᕦ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ᕤ");
Console.ReadLine();

But you need to change the console's default font to something like consolas. With font changed to Consolas it looks like:

Screenshot / proof

With the default font it looks like:

Screenshot / proof

And if you change the font but don't set the output encoding it looks like:

Screenshot / proof

The console's default encoding is OEM Multilingual Latin 1; Western European (DOS) e.g. "IBM850" or OEM United States e.g. "IBM437".

However, as suggested in other comments: don't. Just don't. Here's why.

1 Answers1