How do the new string types work in Delphi 2009/2010?

Question

I have to convert a large legacy application to Delphi 2009 which uses strings, AnsiStrings, WideStrings and UTF8 data all over the place and I have a hard time to understan

Answer 1

See Delphi and Unicode, a white paper written by Marco Cantù and I guess The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!), written by Joel.

One pitfall is that the default Win32 API call has been mapped to use the W (wide string) version instead of the A (ANSI) version, for example ShellExecuteA If your code is doing tricky pointer code assuming internal layout of AnsiString, it will break. A fallback is to substitute PChar with PAnsiChar, Char with AnsiChar, string with AnsiString, and append A at the end of Win32 API call for that portion of code. After the code actually compiles and runs normally, you could refactor your code to use string (UnicodeString).