gdb_wrapper

This is a patch for the problem that you can not watch the content of UTF-8 string variables when debugging with gdb and C/C++ extension for Visual Studio Code (vscode) on Windows.

At first,

This document is written at the time of C/C++ for Visual Studio Code Version 0.14.0 released on October 19, 2017 by Microsoft.

At first, please check "display utf-8 characters on debug watch panel #918" whether the issue was closed. It might be resolved by just updating the extension or updating gdb.

Requirement

• Windows
• Python 3
• Python modules: win32pipe, win32file

Demonstrated environment

• Windows10 64bit build 15063
• Visual Studio Code version 1.17.2
• C/C++ for Visual Studio Code version 0.14.0
• mingw-w64-x86_64-gdb 7.12.1-1
• Python version 3.5.2 in root directory of Miniconda3

This Python environment or later version contains required modules, so recommended.

How to use

Placement

Place four files(wrapper.bat and *.py) in an any directory.

Editing wrapper.bat

Edit 2 to 6 lines in wrapper.bat

@echo off
set TARGET="B:/msys64/mingw64/bin/gdb.exe"
set PYTHON3=python.exe
set FLAGS=DS
set TARGET_ENCODING=UTF-8
set HOST_ENCODING=CP932

You need to edit at least three variables.

• TARGET : Path to gdb.exe
• PYTHON3 : Path to python.exe
• HOST_ENCODING : Encoding acceptable for C/C++ extension

To watch Japanese strings, leave HOST_ENCODING as CP932. I don't know about other languages. You might need some trial and error.

Please see docstring in wrapper.py to see about FLAGS.

Editing launch.json

Edit configurations for debugger in launch.json.

 :
"MIMode": "gdb",
"miDebuggerPath": "B:/path/to/gdb_wrapper/wrapper.bat",
"setupCommands": [
	{
		"description": "Set both of target-charset and host-charset to UTF-8",
		"text": "set charset UTF-8",
		"ignoreFailures": false
	},
	{
		"description": "Escape non-ascii characters to octal notation",
		"text": "set print sevenbit-strings on",
		"ignoreFailures": false
	},
	{
		"description": "Enable pretty-printing for gdb",
		"text": "-enable-pretty-printing",
		"ignoreFailures": false
	}
]

Write the path to wrapper.bat for miDebuggerPath instead of the path to gdb. Add two commands to set charset UTF-8 and to set print sevenbit-strings on in setupCommands.

Debugging

Do debug.

If you can not watch UTF-8 string variables well, rewrite HOST_ENCODING in wrapper.bat.

You can set FLAGS=DSE to see communication between vscode and gdb in another window. It may help you to watch content of variables temporarily.

That's all.