Am 2013-12-28 14:01, schrieb Michael Van Canneyt: > As it happens, I am preparing the documentation for 2.6.4, and I checked: the bug is fixed. > So the bug should be fixed on the website one of the next days. > Now, I realize that the strings issue is rather messy, Delphi > engineers really messed it up. > Following your message, I looked up Delphi's docus: > http://docwiki.embarcadero.com/Libraries/XE5/en/System.SysUtils.FindFirst > No mention of encoding either. > I am looking for a way to make sure that when the unicode version is made, > the documentation will make clear what 'string' means if it appears somewhere in a declaration. > You can help by making suggestions. Anything that does not require me going over all functions that require string arguments is good :)
I always stumble over encodings and the documentation is of no help. Another example I found recently: I wanted to display error messages and found that SysErrorMessage should give me what I want. It is said to be "cross platform", so I thought the encoding is the same (UTF8) as for all other "cross platform" functions (otherwise why is it called "cross platform"?). But only by accident I found out that the encoding cannot be UTF8 because it did not display all characters correctly (which only becomes apparent when german umlauts appear so it could go wrong for a long time until it this bug is discovered because errors should not happen very often and even if they appear not all contain umlauts). So I took a look into the documentation to find out about the encoding: http://lazarus-ccr.sourceforge.net/docs/rtl/sysutils/syserrormessage.html There it says: --------------------- function SysErrorMessage( ErrorCode: Integer ):; SysErrorMessage returns a string that describes the operating system error code ErrorCode. --------------------- Yet another documentation bug? What kind of string is given back? But even if it would say "string" it would be of no use for me. Which encoding? How should a user find out what he has to do in his program to display a correct string in a ShowMessage() or whatever? This is a real mess. Actually I found out by trial and error that ShowMessage(Trim(SysToUTF8(SysErrorMessage(GetLastError)))); is required to get a correct string (Trim is needed because trailing spaces and tabs may appear). I would expect that for all these functions where stings are involved at least a link to the encoding is added that tells the user that he will get back an AnsiString with System-ANSI-encoding (or whatever he will get back on other OS's). How else should a user find out about this? -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus
