Next: I was wrong about ansistrings - on Windows their are (PCHAR's) used (until WinNT arrived) in far east localized versions coupled with multibyte encoding. So currenltly for legacy applications multibyte encoded character sets are supported in any WinNT box.
PS. I hope mine patch (bug 3451) extending Widestring support in compiler will finally be applied to CVS and we can proceed with RTL modifications to support more extended ansi to wide strings conversions. ;-)
PPS. AFAIK UTF-8 is not used internally in any OS - it's only used for storing UNICODE text in more compact form - web site authors really like it.
----- Original Message ----- From: "peter green" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "FPC developers' list" <fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org>
Sent: Thursday, January 06, 2005 12:19 AM
Subject: RE: [fpc-devel] ansistrings and widestrings
in wondows terminology (which i presume is where the name ansistring comes from) the windows code page which is often refered to in documentation as the ansi code page CAN be multi byte.
http://www.microsoft.com/globaldev/reference/WinCP.mspx
more generally i belive an ansistring is usually intended to represent text in the platforms local encoding. Whilst a widestring is meant to represent text in utf-16.
The platforms local encoding may be a single byte encodeing (iso-8859-? windows-125? etc) it may be a legacy mixed width encoding (EUC-?? SHIFT-JIS BIG5 etc) or it may be a unicode transformation format which is a superset of ascii (utf-8).
now for dependency reasons i belive that the default conversion functions should remain a "dumb fallback" BUT i also belive that the function prototypes should be designed in such a way as to allow the conversion routines to be replaced with ones that can sesiblly handle the local encoding.
i've created a page on the wiki for this issue at http://www.freepascal.org/wiki/index.php/Widestrings
_______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
