[fpc-devel] Controlling the output of the widestring manager

[Marco van de Voort]

> Op Fri, 30 Nov 2007, schreef Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho:
> 
> > What do other FPC developers think of this?
> > 
> > Should it be the responsability of the fpc user to write it's own
> > routines to override the output of the widestring manager or should
> > FPC provide this mechanism?
> 
> The default widestring manager does not fullfill in all conversion needs 
> and should be expanded to give users more control over conversions.
> 
> However, when expanding the functionality it should be done properly, not 
> in a way that it will have to be changed over and over again. Not all 
> functionality needs to work at once, if you just want to support UTF-8 in 
> the beginning this is okay.
> 
> The API, however, should be solid and future proof, as it needs to be 
> backward compatible.

Since we are talking about expanding the widestringmanager, I'm considering
adding mblen. This because I encountered people using unit libc for it a few
times. It is also a needed primitive to safely walk a string with any 
encoding style that has non fixed codepoint size.

FreeBSD and Linux support it, so OS X still needs to be checked. Windows is
probably no problem, since the use probably originates in Delphi
(sysutils(?).strnext).