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

[Aleksa Todorovic]

On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 10:06, Graeme Geldenhuys
<graemeg.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> 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've used this ""hack"" in my projects so far (both FPC and C++), it
works really well, and I don't have a bit of problem with it. The
simple rules I use is:

- all internal strings in a project must be in UTF-8 (which I used)
- all localized strings are written in external files, never inside the code
- encoding/decoding is done in three situations:
1) before/after I/O operations (where I know/force encoding and format
of files I use)
2) before/after system calls (if neccessary)
3) in several and well-defined places in GUI

As far as I can see, Lazarus team made similar decisions. Yes, this
ab-uses AnsiString, but it works, and it works really well :-)

As of Unicode future inside FPC, after reading Marco's document, I'm
sure FPC will be compiler with superb support for Unicode (both
compiler- and RTL-side).

Greets,
Aleksa