[Lazarus] UTF8String and UTF8Delete

[wkitty42 at windstream.net]

On 12/13/2015 05:43 PM, Juha Manninen wrote:
> On Sun, Dec 13, 2015 at 11:18 PM,  <wkitty42 at windstream.net> wrote:
>> i don't because i'm just barely dipping my toes into the UTF-8 pool... one
>> of my first tasks was to convert today's mess back to CP437 for posting in
>> pure text environments... it wasn't too hard but it was tedious with tables
>> for converting quoted-printable, html entities and unicode so that things
>> like
>>
>>    ©
>>    #$C2#$A9
>>    =A9
>>    &#169
>>
>> are all converted to the old style "(c)" copyright... the same for "(tm)"
>> and others... 1/4, 1/2, 3/4 are additional examples...
>
> You mean you convert from Unicode to CP437 system codepage?

yes... plain text readers and editors cannot handle the fancy mess of today's 
world... they only know CP437 or maybe CP850...

> Uhhh... most people do the exact opposite and want to get rid of the
> horrors of local codepages using any means possible.

most people are not writing utilities for genuine old-school text-mode BBSes, 
either ;)

> What means "pure text environments"? Unicode is also pure text, only
> the encodings are more sane.

pure text as in only the 255 characters that CP437 offers... think DOS v6.xx 
command line... no graphics other than the few dozen or so characters offered 
 >127 in CP437... i've already mentioned the single and double line frame 
characters... there's also the shading (stippled?) and solid block characters...

>> i'm hoping to dip further into the pool in the next few years...
>
> Now you convert from Unicode to CP437. Next year you start to convert
> from CP437 to Unicode.
> Ok. You may be doing something dummy now but it is not my business of
> course... :)

no, not "dummy" at all... it has everything to do with the technology target... 
in one case, we're converting emailed news letters to plain CP437 text for 
posting in old school BBS message bases... pdf crap is out as it any sort of 
html or unicode cruft... there are no QWK or BlueWave offline readers that can 
render any of that mess...

BTW: yes, Fidonet and WWIVnet and similar old school BBS message networks still 
exist today... get back to the real roots of computer based comms B)


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