[fpc-devel] Unicode support (yet again)

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

On 15/09/2011 10:16, Michael Schnell wrote:
> In fact  users want to deal  with "decently coded characters"  and not
> with  "cryptic  bytes  some  of  which  together  are  representing  a
> character". (e.g. when doing MyChar := MyString[1]; )

None of our company's users using  our products would even know what the
hell you are talking about. :-)

But  to convert  your example  to  UTF-8 as  would  be done  in a  fpGUI
application  (which  I again  is  never  really  require in  real  world
applications), it would look as follows:

var
  MyChar: TfpgChar;
  MyString: TfpgString;
begin
  MyString := 'some unicode string even with chars outside BMP';
  MyChar := UTF8Copy(MyString, 1, 1);


The above example is safe, and will always give the correct result, even
for Unicode  characters above the BMP. And  I don't need to  worry about
endianness  (byte order) - unlike UTF-16  which could be in UTF-16BE  or
UTF-16LE and a  Unicode "character" could be a surrogate  pair - so your
example would fail there too.


Regards,
  - Graeme -

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/