[fpc-devel] utf-8 package in Free Pascal

[Marco van de Voort]

In our previous episode, Felipe Monteiro de Carvalho said:
> 
> Not really. One can write a non-visual library which uses utf8string
> as its main string type, why not? But the RTL is not adequate for
> utf8string projects

True, because we never planned to have support for such utf8 only libraries
in the first place. 

> and will still not be after the Unicode RTL is
> completed.

I don't see why not.

> This is the case of fpvectorial and fpspreadsheet for example. If
> there is no fpc package with UTF-8 routines then it becomes impossible
> to write utf-8 non-visual packages which do not depend on the LCL.

> FPSpreadsheet already contains code copied from the LCL utf-8
> routines, I want to stop this multiplication of code copies and unify
> all routines in one base place, which logically should be in Free
> Pascal.

Then factor out the relevant LCL independent stuff to an external project.

If it is non visual, it doesn't automatically mean it should go into FPC.
 
> > till they are superceded in 2.8 by proper unicode support.
> 
> The Unicode RTL is not satisfactory for utf-8 projects. One cannot
> seriously expect to be able to write a project which uses utf8string
> if you don't even have a utf-8 TStringList to share between various
> libraries.

1) There is an unit ansistrings in Delphi for just that. 
2) And if you use the UTF8 spin of the unicode RTL, the default TStringlist is UTF8.