Note: This answer shows how to switch the character encoding in Windows consoles (terminals) to (BOM-less) UTF-8 system-wide (code page 65001), so that shells such as cmd.exe and PowerShell properly encode and decode characters (text) when communicating with external (console) programs with full Unicode support, and in cmd.exe also for file I/O.[1] If, by contrast, your concern is about the separa