[fpc-pascal]TStream.WriteAnsiString

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Tue, 20 Aug 2002, Brian Grainger wrote:

> 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.

The behaviour is as intended. The WriteByte/WriteWord/WriteString etc. all
write binary data to the stream. If you want to write text data, then
you should write your own routines.

Michael.