[fpc-pascal] FPC Unicode / CodePage aware strings

[Graeme Geldenhuys]

Hi,

"official" Unicode support in FPC has been discussed for so long
(years), that I came up with my own solution for fpGUI since 2007 (LCL
did the similar) and it still works 100% and well tested. But now I want
to learn what the FPC team finally came up with in FPC 3.0.

Is there some white paper, blog post, awesome MvC article that explains
it all. And how it compares to Delphi's Unicode support (if this is
important - though I don't use Delphi at all any more).

For example, I looked at a few recent messages here and in the Lazarus
mailing list. I also looked at a length discussion in the Lazarus Forum
which had some example code. I tried out a few things with various
String CodePage valuse and writeln() statements using a UTF-8 encoded
.pas unit, and I got horrible results on my FreeBSD 10.1 system. The
Unicode (UTF-8) output to console that I expected to work simply didn't.
I need to figure out why.

There seems to be a million and one tweaks (options) one can now apply
to the FPC compiler, the RTL, different modes can be set in each unit
etc. It is all very confusing.

So basically what I'm asking, is there a Unicode (or is that the wrong
term) chapter or something in the FPC documentation that describes all
this in easy to understand English. The do's and don't, what works and
what doesn't in FPC 3.0, is the RTL fully Unicode enabled now etc.

Regards,
  - Graeme -

-- 
fpGUI Toolkit - a cross-platform GUI toolkit using Free Pascal
http://fpgui.sourceforge.net/

My public PGP key:  http://tinyurl.com/graeme-pgp