[Lazarus] Lazarus (UTF8) and Windows: SysToUTF8, UTF8ToSys... Is there a better solution?

[Hans-Peter Diettrich]

Jürgen Hestermann schrieb:
> Am 2013-12-25 01:36, schrieb Hans-Peter Diettrich:
>  > Whenever the encoding matters, most users and applications are best off
>  > with their regional Ansi encoding - all used characters are single 
> bytes.
> 
> You forget that using ANSI API functions on Windows not only has the 
> drawback
> that you cannot access all files (which have unicode characters in them)
> but also that there is the limit of 255 characters for the path length
> (while unicode API functions allow up to 32k characters).

For that purpose (file names) I vote for a dedicated string type, that 
matches the target platform requirements. Then the user has not to look 
at filenames on a per-character base.


> Do you realy advice people nowadays to restrict their programs so far by 
> using ANSI API functions?

How many users have to use API functions, which are bound to a single 
platform? And which of these do not understand how to handle strings of 
whatever encoding?

DoDi