[fpc-devel] Unicode support - for the 20th time... ;-)

[Florian Klaempfl]

Graeme Geldenhuys schrieb:
> Hello again,
> 
> We are seeing more and more "hacks" being applied to projects trying
> to scramble around the missing FPC feature - no built-in Unicode
> supporting.
> 
> A simple example in Lazarus.... Loading a UTF-8 encoded file into a TMemo.
> 
> Normally you would write code as follows (for ANSI text):
> 
>    Memo1.Lines.LoadFromFile('someunicodefile.txt');
> 
> 
> Unfortunately that doesn't work if the file contains unicode content,
> so the following "hack" is required which is quite nasty:
> 
>    ls := TStringList.Create;
>    ls.LoadFromFile('someunicodefile.txt');
>    for i := 0 to ls.Count-1 do
>       ls[i] := UTF8Encode(ls[i]);
>    Memo.Lines.Assign(ls);
>    ls.Free

 >
 > I'm also pretty sure I am not the only one that is willing to help
 > with this feature - many developers require Unicode support. And this
 > is just going to become more urgent as time goes by. So lets finalize
 > a design and start implementation. Pretty please. ;-)
 >

Ok, two questions for the example above:
- how do you maintain backward compatibility?
- how do you load a plain old ansi file?