[fpc-devel] utf8 in 2.6.0

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Sat, 5 Jan 2013 13:06:42 +0000
Frank Church <vfclists at gmail.com> wrote:

>[...]
> It is obvious that Unicode is not a simple topic and among FPC/Lazarus
> developers/contributors,I suspect that few if any at all, have a detailed
> grasp of how it all hangs together in the current state of implementation.
> It brings to mind the parable of the 12 blind men and the elephant.

The FPC and Lazarus UTF details are not that difficult. The
complexity comes from adding Delphi *, third party libraries and
old FPC, Lazarus versions.


> I think a diagram or graph of Unicode rules and their current state of
> implementation in FPC/Lazarus would go a long way to helping both
> developers and end users in this area. It is a topic which comes up
> regularly and it doesn't show signs of ever going to be properly resolved.

For Lazarus:
- works with fpc 2.6.x and 2.7.1
- LCL and most code expect ansistrings to hold UTF-8.
- pascal sources, lfm, po files are stored in UTF-8 without BOM.
  Special care has to be taken, when using widestrings/unicodestring.
- there are UTF-8 functions and classes (most in package lazutils).
- the IDE supports many encodings
- all this is documented via wiki and fpdoc
- no support for UTF-16 has been started


>[...]

Mattias