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

[Daniël Mantione]

Op Thu, 20 Nov 2008, schreef Graeme Geldenhuys:

> All that crap just to load a simple text file that contains unicode
> content!!! :-(  And the other problem is that the hack above assumes
> the files content is UTF-8 encoded. If the content is UTF-16 encoded,
> you need yet another hack. :-(
> As far as I know the Unicode spec does mention a way of detecting the
> encoding type (educated guess). As a second stage backup for GUI
> toolkits, we can do the same as KDE or Qt has done in File Open/Save
> dialogs. The user can specify an Encoding type from a combobox
> overriding the auto-detect process.
>
> So PLEASE lets finalize a Unicode strategy for Free Pascal!!!   Like I
> said before, I'm willing to help where I can - be that writing unit
> tests or implementing some RTL functions.  I don't know the deep
> internals of FPC, but the RTL seems relatively easy enough to code.

These instructions are highly unproductive. Work on being able to compile 
the RTL in either ansi/unicode depending on the platform has started.
Full Unicode support is for FPC 2.4. If you need it today, widestrings are 
your best option.

If you want to help, we need to implement the Delphi 2009 encoding aware 
string type, both runtime support as well as the compiler support.

Daniël