wrong encoding when using child_process spawn or exec under Windows

I managed to fix it by adding cmd /c chcp 65001>nul &&(this command sets cmd's console output to utf-8) at start of my exec command, so your would look like cmd /c chcp 65001>nul && dir, it should work.

If you write cross-platform can use process.platform, to determine when you need that, something like that:

var cmd = "";
if (process.platform === "win32") { 
  cmd += "cmd /c chcp 65001>nul && "; 
};
cmd += "dir";

child = exec(cmd, //...

• Even though dir command is not "cross-platform".

From http://www.nodejs.org/api/child_process.html#child_process_child_process_exec_command_options_callback

There is a second optional argument to specify several options. The default options are

{ encoding: 'utf8',
  timeout: 0,
  maxBuffer: 200*1024,
  killSignal: 'SIGTERM',
  cwd: null,
  env: null }

That is Node defaults to utf8, while Windows has different code pages for different language version.