BTW: Synapse has a unit with quite powerful conversion routines and
handles most of the encodings without any support from iconv, i tested
it and it's wonderful :)
At first i was against UTF8 but now i understand it's power, UTF8 is
small since most text is in ASCII 7bit there is no increase there,
that's why the web uses UTF8, and it's also best for storage,
Microsoft chose UTF16 actually UCS2 because they thought UCS2 will be
enough for all characters in all languages, time proved them wrong and
UTF16 is NOT 2 byte encoded but 2 or 4 bytes depending on the
situation, it helps most people but not everyone and it add an extra
empty byte for ASCII text, Delphi seems to have some issues with UTF16
WideStrings i read about it somewhere on the web and there is also a
BIG BIG performance decrease using WideStrings in Delphi so Lazarus
played it smart with UTF8 keeping ASCII/ANSI compatibility to some
level and being fast at the same time, even with the implicit
conversion it is still faster than WideString operations, UTF8 might
look ugly but it is very efficient.
Razvan
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