im working on delphi 7 and i was working on a strings, i came across this
For a string of default length, that is, declared simply as string, max size is always 255. A ShortString is never allowed to grow to more than 255 characters.
on delphi strings
once i had to do something like this in my delphi code (that was for a really big query)
var
sMyStringOF256characters : string;
ilength : integer;
begin
sMyStringOF256characters:='ThisStringisofLength256,ThisStringisofLength256,.....'
//length of sMyStringOF256characters is 256
end;
i get this error
[Error] u_home.pas(38): String literals may have at most 255 elements.
but when i try this
var
iCounter : integer;
myExtremlyLongString : string;
begin
myExtremlyLongString:='';
Label1.Caption:='';
for iCounter:=0 to 2500 do
begin
myExtremlyLongString:=myExtremlyLongString+inttostr(iCounter);
Label1.Caption:=myExtremlyLongString;
end;
Label2.Caption:=inttostr(length(myExtremlyLongString));
end;
and the result is
As you can see the length of myExtremlyLongString is 8894 characters.
why did not delphi give any error saying the length is beyond 255 for myExtremlyLongString?
EDIT
i used
SetLength(sMyStringOF256characters,300);
but it doesnt work.
why did not delphi give any error saying the length is beyond 255 for
myExtremlyLongString?
You have your answer a bit down in the text in section Long String (AnsiString).
In current versions of Delphi, the string type is simply an alias for
AnsiString,
So string is not limited to 255 characters but a string literal is. That means that you can build a string that is longer than 255 characters but you can not have a string value in code that is longer than 255 characters. You need to split them if you want that.
sMyString:='ThisStringisofLength255'+'ThisStringisofLength255';
Split it up into:
sMyStringOF256characters :=
'ThisStringis' +
'ofLength256' +
'And ManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyMany' +
'ManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyMany' +
'ManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyMany' +
'ManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyMany' +
'ManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyMany' +
'ManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyMany' +
'ManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyMany' +
'ManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyManyMany' +
'CharactersCharactersCharactersCharactersCharactersCharactersCharactersCharacters';
Back in old DOS/Turbo Pascal days, "strings" were indeed limited to 255 characters. In large part because the 1st byte contained the string length, and a byte can only have a value between 0 and 255.
That is no longer an issue in contemporary versions of Delphi.
"ShortString" is the type for the old DOS/Pascal string type.
"LongString" has been the default string type for a long time (including the Borland Delphi 2006 I currently use for most production work). LongStrings (aka "AnsiStrings") hold 8-bit characters, and are limited only by available memory.
Recent versions of Delphi (Delphi 2009 and higher, including the new Delphi XE2) all now default to multi-byte Unicode "WideString" strings. WideStrings, like AnsiStrings, are also effectively "unlimited" in maximum length.
This article explains in more detail:
http://delphi.about.com/od/beginners/l/aa071800a.htm
The difference is that in your first code example you are putting the string as part of your code - literal string. That has a limitation on how many characters it will allow.
In your second code example you are generating it dynamically and not putting it as one big literal string.
String type in Delphi (unlike shortstring that can only be up to 255) can be as big as your memory.
You could try using the StringBuilder class:
procedure TestStringBuilder;
var
I: Integer;
StringBuilder: TStringBuilder;
begin
StringBuilder := TStringBuilder.Create;
try
for I := 1 to 10 do
begin
StringBuilder.Append('a string ');
StringBuilder.Append(66); //add an integer
StringBuilder.Append(sLineBreak); //add new line
end;
OutputWriteLine('Final string builder length: ' + IntToStr(StringBuilder.Length));
finally
StringBuilder.Free;
end;
end;
If you need realy long string in Delphi, you can load it from other resources like a txt files or just plain text with any extension. Im using it and it works. You can create "like a" array tables using plain text lines numbers. In delphi code, you can do as #arjen van der Spek and others says only.
For me, files with text as var's formated -
sometext:string=
'txt...'+
'txt...'+
'txt...';
are bad for future editing.
pros: you can use any long text.
cons: text code is open, anybody can read it opening file in notepad etc.
Related
Creating a TCP server that needs to process some data. I have a net.Conn instance "connection"from which I will read said data. The lower part of the snippet brings about an error noting that it cannot use the 'esc' value as a byte value.
const(
esc = "\a\n"
)
....
c := bufio.NewReader(connection)
data, err := c.ReadBytes(esc)
Clearly, some conversion is needed but when I try
const(
esc = "\a\n"
)
....
c := bufio.NewReader(connection)
data, err := c.ReadBytes(byte(esc))
The compiler makes note that I cannot convert esc to byte. Is it due to the fact that I declared "\a\n" as a const value on the package level? Or is there something else overall associated with how I'm framing the bytes to be read?
You can't convert esc to byte because you can't convert strings into single bytes. You can convert a string into a byte slice ([]byte).
The bufio.Reader only supports single byte delimiters, you should use a bufio.Scanner with a custom split function instead for multi-byte delimiters.
Perhaps a modified version of https://stackoverflow.com/a/37531472/1205448
Hope somebody can help me with this problem - I have to read data from an interface that is specified like this:
<Each message consists of a 2-byte length (in network byte order) followed by that many bytes of data. The end of the msg series is indicated by an empty message (length of 0).>
Using TDataPortTCP I can read the buffer with Dataport.Peek(size) and pull the data from the buffer with Dataport.Pull(size) - both methods provide the result as AnsiStr
I imagine that something like this should work, but I have no idea how to convert AnsiStr to Bytes and vice versa:
while DataPortTCP.Peek(2) > ZeroBytes do
begin
LengthInBytes := DataPortTCP.Pull(2) ;
sContent := DataPortTCP.Pull(LengthInByte) ;
end;
How do I declare / get / convert ZeroBytes and LengthInBytes and how do I have to deal with Endianess ?
Unfortunately I know nothing about TBytes and what I read so far did only lead to more confusion ;-)
I would be very grateful if someone could point me into the right direction.
To check whether a string is not empty, you can compare to ''.
To retrieve the byte value from a string, you can access the character and apply the ord function.
Network order is big endian, mean that the first byte is of higher order. Hence you need to shift it to the left using shl. In this case, there are two bytes, so the first on is shifted 8 bits, which amounts to multiplying it by 256.
var
LengthInBytesStr: String;
LengthInBytes: Word;
begin
...
while DataPortTCP.Peek(2) <> '' do
begin
LengthInBytesStr := DataPortTCP.Pull(2);
LengthInBytes := (ord(LengthInBytesStr[1]) shl 8)
+ ord(LengthInBytesStr[2]);
sContent := DataPortTCP.Pull(LengthInByte);
end;
4I must write strings to a binary MIDI file. The standard requires one to know the length of the string in bytes. As I want to write for mobile as well I cannot use AnsiString, which was a good way to ensure that the string was a one-byte string. That simplified things. I tested the following code:
TByte = array of Byte;
function TForm3.convertSB (arg: string): TByte;
var
i: Int32;
begin
Label1.Text := (SizeOf (Char));
for i := Low (arg) to High (arg) do
begin
label1.Text := label1.Text + ' ' + IntToStr (Ord (arg [i]));
end;
end; // convert SB //
convertSB ('MThd');
It returns 2 77 84 104 100 (as label text) in Windows as well as Android. Does this mean that Delphi treats strings by default as UTF-8? This would greatly simplify things but I couldn't find it in the help. And what is the best way to convert this to an array of bytes? Read each character and test whether it is 1, 2 or 4 bytes and allocate this space in the array? For converting back to a character: just read the array of bytes until a byte is encountered < 128?
Delphi strings are encoded internally as UTF-16. There was a big clue in the fact that SizeOf(Char) is 2.
The reason that all your characters had ordinal in the ASCII range is that UTF-16 extends ASCII in the sense that characters 0 to 127, in the ASCII range, have the same ordinal value in UTF-16. And all your characters are ASCII characters.
That said, you do not need to worry about the internal storage. You simply convert between string and byte array using the TEncoding class. For instance, to convert to UTF-8 you write:
bytes := TEncoding.UTF8.GetBytes(str);
And in the opposite direction:
str := TEncoding.UTF8.GetString(bytes);
The class supports many other encodings, as described in the documentation. It's not clear from the question which encoding you are need to use. Hopefully you can work the rest out from here.
The cyrllic string my app receives uses(I believe) the table below:
said I believe, because all the chars I tested fit this table.
Question: How do I convert such thing to a string, which is unicode by default in my delphi?
Or better yet: Is there a ready-to-use converter in delphi or should I write one?
If you are using Delphi 2009 or later, this is done automatically:
type
CyrillicString = type AnsiString(1251);
procedure TForm1.FormCreate(Sender: TObject);
var
UnicodeStr: string;
CyrillicStr: CyrillicString;
begin
UnicodeStr := 'This is a test.'; // Unicode string
CyrillicStr := UnicodeStr; // ...converted to 1251
CyrillicStr := 'This is a test.'; // Cryllic string
UnicodeStr := CyrillicStr; // ...converted to Unicode
end;
First of all I recommend you read Marco Cantù's whitepaper on Unicode in Delphi. I am also assuming from your question (and previous questions), that you are using a Unicode version of Delphi, i.e. D2009 or later.
You can first of all define an AnsiString with codepage 1251 to match your input data.
type
CyrillicString = type Ansistring(1251);
This is an important step. It says that any data contained inside a variable of this type is to be interpreted as having been encoded using the 1251 codepage. This allows Delphi to perform correct conversions to other string types, as we will see later.
Next copy your input data into a string of this variable.
function GetCyrillicString(const Input: array of Byte): CyrillicString;
begin
SetLength(Result, Length(Input));
if Length(Result)>0 then
Move(Input[0], Result[1], Length(Input));
end;
Of course, there may be other, more convenient ways to get the data in. Perhaps it comes from a stream. Whatever the case, make sure you do it with something equivalent to a memory copy so that you don't invoke code page conversions and thus lose the 1251 encoding.
Finally you can simply assign a CyrillicString to a plain Unicode string variable and the Delphi runtime performs the necessary conversion automatically.
function ConvertCyrillicToUnicode(const Input: array of Byte): string;
begin
Result := GetCyrillicString(Input);
end;
The runtime is able to perform this conversion because you specified the codepage when defining CyrillicString and because string maps to UnicodeString which is encoded with UTF-16.
Windows API MultiByteToWideChar() and WideCharToMultiByte() can be used to convert to and from any supported code page in Windows. Of course if you use Delphi >= 2009 it is easier to use the native unicode support.
I've just encountered a weird problem. I am trying to load a model to OpenGL and in the part where I load textures I use auxDIBImageLoadA(dibfile:PWideChar) function. Here is my code calling it
procedure CreateTexture(var textureArray: array of UINT; strFileName: string; textureID: integer); // Vytvožení textury
var
pBitmap: PTAUX_RGBImageRec;
begin
if strFileName = '' then exit;
MessageBox(0,PWideChar(strFileName),nil,SW_SHOWNORMAL);
pBitmap := auxDIBImageLoadA(PWideChar(strFileName));
if pBitmap = nil then exit;
...
The MessageBox is just for control. This is what happens: I run the application, a box with "FACE.BMP" appears. Okay. But then I get an error saying "Failed to open DIB file F". When i set the stFileName to xFACE.BMP, I get an "Failed to open DIB file x". So for some reason it appears that the function is taking only the first char.
Am I missing something? I'm using glaux.dll which I downloaded like 5 times from different sources, so it should be bug-free (I hope, every OpenGL site referred to it).
That's odd, functions ending in "A" generally take PAnsiChar pointers, and those ending in "W" take PWideChar pointers. Is there a auxDIBImageLoadW call also? If there is use that one, or try with PAnsiChar, since the PWideChar you pass (two bytes per position) would look like a string one character long if it is evaluated as a 1-byte string.
You need to convert your Unicode string to ANSI. Do it like this
pBitmap := auxDIBImageLoadA (PAnsiChar(AnsiString(strFileName)))
You would be better off calling the Unicode version though
pBitmap := auxDIBImageLoadW (PWideChar(strFileName))