[Lazarus] Dangers of using Move command to insert data into a TBytes array?

[Bo Berglund]

On Wed, 30 Aug 2017 09:48:47 +0200 (CEST), Michael Van Canneyt via
Lazarus <lazarus at lists.lazarus-ide.org> wrote:

>> I must use Move() for handling other data of various kinds like packed
>> records and such too...
>
>If the packed records contain managed data (ansistrings and the like): 
>Don't use move.

Thanks for the advice!
I now have looked over the code and found that the records used are
fixed length, but there exist in some places a few ID members that are
supposed to hold an array of AnsiChar, like in this example:

  TSSCmdDirRec = packed record
		CmdProgNum:	shortint;
		InUse:			shortint;
		ProgID: array[0..16] of AnsiChar; // <== here!
		meastype:		byte;
		numSteps:		word;
		MUX:				shortint;
		numElecs:		word;
		progLoc: 		cardinal;
		ArrayID:		shortint;
	end;

These records are equivalents of the C structs used on an embedded
data collection system, which sends data organized in this way in
straight binary form. In the case of ProgID it is defined there as:

char     progID[17];

What I do is that I receive the binary data into a buffer, then use
Move() to copy the data into a local varable of the record type and
finally I use a procedure to switch endianness on members which are
multi-byte.
This has worked fine until Unicode was introduced in Delphi/FPC when I
tried to fix it using AnsiChar and AnsiString as appropriate.
But no string type in these records, just arrays of AnsiChar...

Anyway, I'm glad I checked with you. I initially had calculated the
number of bytes in my Move operation erroneously. Now fixed.
I did not see any side effects of it though, probably just pure luck.

-- 
Bo Berglund
Developer in Sweden