Add option to enforce UTF‑8 output for Meson tasks on Windows

[faithysq666]

Feature request: UTF‑8 output option for tasks

On Windows, Meson task output in VS Code often suffers from encoding issues (garbled characters, especially with non‑ASCII text). Currently, the extension launches tasks directly with meson ..., which inherits the default code page (CP936/CP1252). This causes problems when reading output containing Unicode characters.

Proposed solution:
Introduce a configuration option (e.g. "meson.useUtf8Output": true) that makes the extension wrap all ProcessExecution calls with:

cmd.exe /c chcp 65001 >NUL && meson ...

This ensures the terminal code page is switched to UTF‑8 before running Meson, so all output is consistently encoded.

Benefits:

• Correct display of Unicode characters in output
• Better compatibility with projects using internationalized strings
• No need for users to manually patch the extension

Environment:

• VS Code version: 1.106.2
• Extension version: 1.28.0
• OS: Windows 10/11
• Meson version: 1.9.1

Additional context:
I tested a local modification by wrapping ProcessExecution with cmd.exe /c chcp 65001, and it solved the problem. Having this as a built‑in option would make the extension more user‑friendly for Windows developers.

[Jannik2099]

I tested a local modification by wrapping ProcessExecution with cmd.exe /c chcp 65001

Mind opening a PR?
I briefly looked into this, but my windows knowledge is palpable. It seems other build systems do something similar.

[faithysq666]

I tested a local modification by wrapping ProcessExecution with cmd.exe /c chcp 65001

Mind opening a PR? I briefly looked into this, but my windows knowledge is palpable. It seems other build systems do something similar.

Sorry, I’m not very familiar with the VSCode extension development ecosystem. I only understand a bit of JavaScript and command‑line usage, so I just modified a small part of the source to test. Since I mainly use Arch Linux now, I didn’t keep that change. The modification was simply switching the terminal code page to UTF‑8 (chcp 65001) before running tasks, so compilers like MSVC could output Chinese characters correctly.