"Language for non-Unicode programs " affects my unicode program

[code_discuss]

in Windows, Control Panel > Regional and Language Options > Advanced > Language for non-Unicode programs It says that 'It does not affect Unicode programs' But as to my program, if I choose English as the 'Language for non-Unicode programs', everything is fine. my program can show Chinese or Korean both in menus and dialogs. but if I choose Chinese as the 'Language for non-Unicode programs', My program can't display Korean, if I choose Korean, my program can't display Chinese. So it seems that my program is affected by this setting. Maybe my program is not a unicode program? I used UNICODE _UNICODE, and I set wWinMainCRTStartup as the entry point. everything seems working. So where shall I check? I don't want my program to be affected by this Windows setting.

[Matthew Faithfull]

If you're using Windows CE up to 5.0 then you've simply run up against the 'can't use more than one east asian language' (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) limitation which is built into CE. It sounds more like XP in which case your problem would likely be with the default code page as I think that's what's being set in the dialog you mention. Somewhere in your code the default code page is being referenced in a conversion from UNICODE to ANSI characters and setting it to non English is messing up one set of characters or the other. I suspect that when the default code page is English Windows can detect Chinese and Korean characters because they're all 'invalid' in the old ASCII range but when it's Chinese the Korean character values look valid. (Beause of CJK shared characters some of them probably are ). To be safe accross Windows systems that default to all 3 languages you'll need to find the conversion that's failing and preferably avoid it altogether. Remember to separate what you see (glyphs from a font) from the code points that are being represented. I find it helps to try and think in code points but that's really difficult if you're looking at your native language. I18n is hard, good luck.

Nothing is exactly what it seems but everything with seems can be unpicked.