LoadFromFile with Unicode data

Question

My input file(f) has some Unicode (Swedish) that isn't being read correctly.

Neither of these approaches works, although they give different results:

  LoadFromFile(f);

or

  LoadFromFile(f,TEncoding.GetEncoding(GetOEMCP));

I'm using Delphi XE

How can I LoadFromFile some Unicode data....also how do I subsequently SaveToFile? Thanks

Answer 1

In order to load a Unicode text file you need to know its encoding. If the file has a Byte Order Mark (BOM), then you can simply call LoadFromFile(FileName) and the RTL will use the BOM to determine the encoding.

If the file does not have a BOM then you need to explicitly specify the encoding, eg

LoadFromFile(FileName, TEncoding.UTF8);
LoadFromFile(FileName, TEncoding.Unicode);//UTF-16 LE
LoadFromFile(FileName, TEncoding.BigEndianUnicode);//UTF-16 BE

For some reason, unknown to me, there is no built in support for UTF-32, but if you had such a file then it would be easy enough to add a TEncoding instance to handle that.

Answer 2

I assume that you mean 'UTF-8' when you say 'Unicode'.

If you know that the file is UTF-8, then do

LoadFromFile(f, TEncoding.UTF8).

To save:

SaveToFile(f, TEncoding.UTF8);

(The GetOEMCP WinAPI function is for old 255-character character sets.)