On Sat, 12 Dec 2015 12:43:57 -0500 wkitt...@windstream.net wrote: >[...] > > In Lazarus it is now UTF-8. Besides, it is amazingly compatible with > > Delphi at source level.
Just to clarify: It is amazing how small the percentage of most program sources is that handles non English characters. That's why most Delphi string code works without changes with Lazarus. > > In any case the current system is much better than the old AnsiString > > + dedicated UTF...() functions hack. > > ok... so do we just define a var as string and stuff any old thing into it? > if > so, /how/ does it know that two or more bytes are for one code point or > whether > they are actually separate bytes? Note: UTF8 has 1 to 4 bytes per codepoint. See http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/UTF-8. Here are examples how to work with UTF-8 strings. http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/UTF8_strings_and_characters > i still do a lot of stuff with the old >127 > CP437 graphical characters (especially the single and double line box drawing > characters) and things are really messed up at times... Unicode has the box drawing characters as well and so does UTF-8. FPC 3.0 write and writeln are now clever enough to convert to console codepage. You can now simply use the ╩ character in writeln and in LCL captions and it will work cross platform, e.g. any Windows with any language and even on Linux and Mac OS X. See here: http://wiki.lazarus.freepascal.org/Better_Unicode_Support_in_Lazarus#Writing_to_console Mattias -- _______________________________________________ Lazarus mailing list Lazarus@lists.lazarus.freepascal.org http://lists.lazarus.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/lazarus