Hi, I just read all the comments about the following bug report in filed under the Lazarus project. http://bugs.freepascal.org/view.php?id=12676
The comments posted doesn't seem sufficient to me. If a user selects a file to be loaded, they have no clue if that file is ANSI, UTF-8, UTF-16 etc encoded. The suggestion by the Lazarus developers is to ALWAYS assume the file is in UTF-8 (just because LCL uses UTF-8 internally) and to do a UTF8Encode on each line of the file. So what happens if you do a .SavetoFile(...)? Must you UTF8Decode each line again?? This supposed solution fails horribly in practice. What if the file was UTF-16 encoded? The load will fail as they assumed UTF-8 and I don't even want to think what's going to happen if you save the file again. The bug reporter mentioned his file contained special German characters like ü, ä, ö or ß and they were not handled appropriately. Once loaded and saved, he couldn't load the file again. I believe Delphi 2009 extended the .LoadFromFile(...) and .SaveToFile(...) methods with an optional encoding parameter. Could something like this be added to TStringList etc? I guess we would also need some auto encoding detection in place. How do other text editors managed to auto detect the file encodings - to a degree of accuracy? Also, if the .LoadFromFile(...) and .SaveToFile(...) methods were extended, then we (GUI toolkit developers) could extend File Open and File Save dialogs like Qt has done. If the auto encoding detection didn't work, the user can use the combobox in the file open/save dialog to specify a encoding to use. Web Browsers have a similar feature when displaying HTML. Regards, - Graeme - _______________________________________________ fpGUI - a cross-platform Free Pascal GUI toolkit http://opensoft.homeip.net/fpgui/ _______________________________________________ fpc-devel maillist - fpc-devel@lists.freepascal.org http://lists.freepascal.org/mailman/listinfo/fpc-devel
