[fpc-devel] Unicode resource strings

[Aleksa Todorovic]

On Tue, Aug 21, 2012 at 9:53 AM, Martin Schreiber <mse00000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Am 21.08.2012 09:31, schrieb Graeme Geldenhuys:
>
>
> Ehm, I did both. In the beginning MSEgui switched from Widestring to utf-8
> encoded Ansistring because of the buggy FPC widestring implementation
> (MSEgui started with Delphi/Kylix). Some weeks later I switched back to
> widestring and bite the bullet to write FPC bug reports until it reached
> usable stability.
>
>
>  But if you are such a UTF-16 (actually UCS-2 as
>>
>> that is what MSEgui supports) fan, why isn't MSEgui source code stored
>> in UTF-16 encoding either? ;-)
>
>
> Sure, MSEgui uses utf-8 for external storing and exchanging text data.
> Internal all is 16 bit UnicodeString. Use the best encoding for the task.
> ;-)

+1

There are lot of encodings around, but for different areas of application:
- external text assets could be in any encoding (system-locale
encoding, UTF8, UTF16 both BE and LE - for example, MS Excel export
UTF16 text file)
- Windows system calls are UTF16, on (most of) other platforms UTF8
- input translation (physical keyboard to Unicode character)
- internal application representation is choice of developer

The problem here is that libraries floating around (including RTL and
FCL) use different string types (UnicodeString, UTF8String,
AnsiString), so the question is - is it possible to (re)write those
libraries in a generic way (RawByteString?), so they can work with any
string type?

In my experience, only about 1% of applications requires handling of
individual Unicode characters (input, rendering, GUI text editing).
Other parts of application can happily without that knowledge :-)


Aleksa