[fpc-devel] TStringList.LoadFromFile and SavetoFile - file encoding support

[Mattias Gaertner]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2009 09:39:58 +0100 (CET)
Michael Van Canneyt <michael at freepascal.org> wrote:

> 
> 
> On Tue, 3 Feb 2009, Vincent Snijders wrote:
> 
> > Graeme Geldenhuys schreef:
> > > On Tue, Feb 3, 2009 at 9:02 AM, Vincent Snijders
> > > <vsnijders at vodafonevast.nl> wrote:
> > > > I am a Lazarus developer, and I don't think I said it like that.
> > > 
> > > I wasn't pointing fingers to you Vincent. :-) I summarized what a
> > > few people have said.
> > > 
> > > > LoadFromFile in a LCL control, you need to make sure they are
> > > > valid UTF8 strings. And honestly, it is only you who make sure
> > > > that it is, because you
> > > > know the initial encoding.
> > > 
> > > The problem is as follows.... Even though I am a long time
> > > developer, I often have no clue what encoding a file is in when I
> > > look at the file using Nautilus file manager. I often open a file
> > > in my preferred text editor, look if it displays correctly, then
> > > look in the statusbar area for what encoding the editor detected
> > > (at least my editor does that nicely).
> > > 
> > 
> > The LCL does not have this feature. It can only handle UTF8. period.
> > 
> > > So even though you are using something as simple as the TMemo in
> > > LCL, and LCL always wants UTF-8, how do you know what encoding to
> > > convert from to UTF-8?
> > 
> > If you don't know, you cannot process it. Simple.
> 
> This is why many editors and mail programs have a menu option
> 'Encoding': because they also don't know, and they cannot know
> without external means, what the encoding is.

Let's add that to TMemo. ;)

Mattias