[fpc-devel] TRegistry and Unicode

[Marco van de Voort]

Op 2/25/2019 om 9:27 PM schreef Michael Van Canneyt:
>  I'm currently involved in some TRegistry bugs and regressions.
>> Personally I don't use TRegistry in any of my programs.
>> Also I mostly use Lazarus, so most most of the issues don't affect me.
>>
>> However I would like to share som observations and thoughts.
>>
>> TRegistry on Windows now (3.2+) uses Unicode API.
>> String input parameters in the various methods get "promoted" to
>> Unicode and then the API is called.
>> Returned string values however are mostly encode in UTF8, by
>> explicitely calling Utf8Encode(SomeUnicodeString).
>> Is that (enforce UTF8 encoding) by design?
>> (The Ansi to Unicode was done via UTF8Decode which is definitively
>> wrong and is fixed by now.)
>>
>> On Lazarus, this no problem, since by default all strings are UTF8
>> encoded, so all conversions are lossless.
>
> I think Lazarus users are the main TRegistry users, so I would keep 
> current
> behaviour for the public API. Where possible add overloads that use a
> unicodestring, and let the UTF8 one call the unicode one.

The current situation does not improve anything for Lazarus users that 
set the default encoding to utf8 (aka utf8hack)

If I look into e.g. registry.pp, the only use of utf8encode there is  
like this:

var  s : string;

        u:unicodestring;

s:=utf8encode(u);

which, IF lazarus is used in the default utf8 mode is equivalent to


s:=u;

  So currently this utf8encode only frustrates the situation for people 
that don't set the default codepage to utf8?

If I'm wrong, what is the exact behaviour that you want to keep?