[Lazarus] cwstring in arm-linux

[Žilvinas Ledas]

Hi,

On 2011-10-22 00:48, Hans-Peter Diettrich wrote:
> Žilvinas Ledas schrieb:
>> Hello,
>>
>> On 2011-10-21 10:43, Michael Schnell wrote:
>>> Of course you are right, but "move" and friends is "hardware-near 
>>> programming" for this who know what they are doing. but basic 
>>> (legacy) string operations like "myChar := myString[i]" is 
>>> "office-level programming" and thus should work as a dummy expects.
>>>
>>
>> What if a file on the user computer has 4byte [visible] character as 
>> 8th character and you, for example want to get 8 character file name? 
>> In this case you split that 4 byte character and have garbage.
>
> Then you (or your boss) didn't understand the meaning of "4 
> characters". (Logical) characters are different from physical Chars, 
> in every MBCS codepage.
I know that logical characters are different from physical. I was trying 
to make a point, that even usint UTF16 you MUST check any string comming 
trom outside world.
>
>> What it user inputs in your text field (or a command line parameter 
>> or anywhere else) a string containing 4 byte character and you split 
>> that string on that character? (For example when showing some kind of 
>> summary of his input.) Don't forget that user can input characters by 
>> copy-pasting them from the web, not only using his keyboard!
>
> See above. With proportial fonts, counting characters is a bad idea, 
> instead the width of the displayed string (in pixels) should be used. 
> Then you also can deal with languages and character sets, which use 
> ligatures and the like. Even with monospaced fonts the "characters" 
> (glyphs) can have a different width, in multiples of the basic width, 
> e.g. for Chinese or other eastern character sets.
>
>> So, if you want to write PROFESSIONAL software with any user input - 
>> you must handle 4 byte characters at every place you get user input.
>
> Counting characters then is a bad idea, see above.
>
>> Otherwise you leave a chance to get and show to the user garbage. Is 
>> this really easier than using UTF8 everywhere?
>>
>> My personal experience: I am maintaining (as a hobby project) 
>> multi-language dictionary program (a screen-shoot: 
>> http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_3-IaodGIbVQ/TMHY-l9M4sI/AAAAAAAAAak/AbtShWq0ZUQ/s1600/KZod_screen_win7.png
>
> Great :-)
>
>> ) and it involves quite a bit of [multilingual] string manipulation 
>> and when I did migration from delphi to Lazarus I didn't know about 
>> requirement that all (GUI) strings must be UTF8 and I had no problems 
>> migrating! Yes, afterwards I tweaked some calls to RTL (mostly file 
>> handling) functions that expected to get ANSI encoding, but this is 
>> not a problem of UTF8, but or RTL being (mostly) ansi.
>
> From which Delphi version did you migrate?
> What encoding did you use in Delphi?
>
 From Delphi 5.
Actually, it was quite do not remember now what I was using :) I think 
it was a mix of ansi/wide/utf8 strings.


Regards,
Žilvinas Ledas