[fpc-pascal] Funny things about utf-8 strings on mac

[Jonas Maebe]

On 13 jun 2007, at 11:26, Florian Klaempfl wrote:

>> Sorry, but this view is too "terminal-centric" as far as I am  
>> concerned.
>> That's not something you want to tell users of a GUI app. Or even
>> programmers, for that matter. I really don't see a reason why this
>> should not be configurable by the programmer himself.
>
> Well, then something with the design is wrong. Ansistrings are per
> definition strings which use the default 8 bit encoding of the
> environment.

The problem is the definition of "environment". What libiconv  
considers as environment (some terminal environment variables) does  
not necessarily match the api's you are using in your program.

> Putting always utf-8 into them is abusing them and that's
> why there is an utf8string type in the system unit.

I'm not saying that they should always contain utf-8, but that the  
programmer should be able to control this. It's also not just about  
explicitly using ansistrings, but also about constant strings. If you  
have

api_which_expects_utf8_string(p: pchar)

and do

api_which_expects_utf8_string('łóżka')

then you'd like a way for that constant string to be passed as utf-8  
in all cases without needing to put utf8encode() calls everywhere in  
your program (especially if all api routines I use expect utf-8,  
which is pretty much the case on Darwin/Mac OS X).


Jonas