The situation: I’ve an external DLL that uses UTF-8 as its internal string format. The interface functions all use PAnsiChar to pass strings along.
The rest of my application uses Delphi’s native string
type; since I’m working with Delphi 2010, that will map to a UnicodeString
.
How can I reliably cast those PAnsiChar arguments (which are pointing to UTF-8 encoded strings) to a UnicodeString?
I had this function, which I thought worked fine:
function PUTF8CharToString(Text: PAnsiChar): string;
var
UText: UTF8String;
begin
UText := UTF8String(Text);
Result := string(UText);
end;
...but now I’ve run into a case where the result string is corrupted; when I save the PAnsiChar to file, it’s fine; but when I save the resulting string after conversion using the above function, it’s corrupted.
Or should this work correctly, and is this indicative of some other memory (de)allocation problem?
Edit: I finally managed to get rid of the memory corruption by assigning the converted string to a local variable string, instead of directly passing it to another function.