[fpc-pascal]TStream.WriteAnsiString

[Brian Grainger]

Greetings.

I'm having a problem with TStream.WriteAnsiString. My apologies if this has 
been answered previously, I haven't seen it in the archive.

I'm using the procedure to write an ansistring of valid XML to a file. The 
problem is that the procedure also writes the length of the ansistring as a 
variable length binary field at the start of the string. The XML parser 
chokes on what it thinks is some kind of binary gibberish at the very start 
of the file.

   Procedure TStream.WriteAnsiString (S : String);
   Var L : Longint;
   begin
     L:=Length(S);
     WriteBuffer (L,SizeOf(L));  <---- This is the problem.
     WriteBuffer (Pointer(S)^,L);
   end;

What was the reason for this design decision? I can work around it by 
writing my own similar procedure which doesn't write the string length 
bytes, but it would be nicer to use a standard routine from the library.

Regards,
Brian