Casting Delphi 2009/2010 string literals to PAnsiChar

Question

So the question is whether or not string literals (or const strings) in Delphi 2009/2010 can be directly cast as PAnsiChar\'s or do they need an additional cast to AnsiString fi

Answer 1

As Mason Wheeler points out all is fine as long as you don't have non-ANSI characters in your string const. If you have things like:

const FRED = 'Frédérick';

I'm pretty sure Delphi 2009/2010 will either issue charset hints (and apply a string conversion automatically - thus the hint) or fail at comparing ('Frédérick' is different in ISO-8859-1 than UTF-16).

If you can have "special" characters in your consts you will need to call string conversion.

Here are some basic examples with TStringList:

TStringList.SaveToFile(DestFilename, TEncoding.GetEncoding(28591)); //ISO-8859-1 (Latin1)
TStringList.SaveToFile(DestFilename, TEncoding.UTF8);